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DOS 5 Upgrade Video
Every now and then I stumble on something so ridiculous that I have to share it. This is a promotion video to upgrade to DOS 5 obviously made in a different era. Promoting features like mouse support, a graphical shell, and freeing up at LEAST 45k of memory, well, Gimme 5! Did I mention that it's all set to a hip beat? You'll love it. And by "Love" I mean "Stick forks in your eyes".
How is this news? /. does not equal Digg.
Much better than 4. And the memory management did help. I remember with the help of QEMM I was able to get something like 633K free, which was incredible.
The marketing geniuses who brought you this video live on in Redmond. Who else would design a brown media player and name it "Zune?"
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Epic Retry?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Can I downgrade to DOS 5 instead? Why, the productivity gains alone would be worth it! And I suspect it's not nearly as bloated as Vista.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Yo! MS Raps - that's comedy right there
My posts are definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Seriously, it seems like all their promos suck. What was that other one posted here? Ballmer pushing Windows 3.1 or something?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4915875929930836239
I watched it.
I hate you now.
Happy?
I cannot get to the video due to my work's security policy, but....
I remember well. Dos 4 sucked. Upgrading to DOS 5 was probably the best upgrade I have ever done from M$!
Of course, DOS 3.4 was fairly stable too!
The goggles do nothing!
Coders today are right lazy bastards. 45kb was a lot. You had to think about organising things properly. Today I write code in languages (PHP mostly, some Perl) that hide all manner of management away from you. I'm certain that someone of my Dad's generation who wrote software in the olden days (1960s/70s/80s) would have a fit at some of the stuff I get away with.
We shouldn't laugh at the idea of freeing up 45k, we should thank our lucky stars it's no longer something we have to care about. We have it easy.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
... the artist is "YO! MS Raps".
"Powers. I have them."
Certainly must have sold better than Vista. Are people getting smarter?
-- Boycott Shell
Putting a joke on ./ is all well and good, but one on CollegeHumor.com is certainly a low point...
I bet MS didn't plan on it sticking around quite as long as that when they made that video!
I know I'm showing my age here but DOS 5 was GREAT. Everyone knew that even numbered DOS releases were very poor. DOS 4 was a hugh piece of crap that IBM force upon Microsoft.(When was te last time you heard that!) After DOS 4 bombed and no one upgraded from their stable DOS 3.11, Microsoft fixed the problems and released v5.
so here's the Youtube version.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
mc chris et al should cover this. This is about as old school as you can get for nerdcore.
Must not get sick, must not throw up... -- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
OK, I'm sold!
Which repository is it in?
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
Epic Ignore!
hehe, I think for this video the actors asked: "how the hell are we supposed to advertise this, what the hell is an MSDOS ??"
marketing: "oh, just grab this little white box and pretend its your favorite brand of cereal, then work on something along those lines"
actors: "oh ok, got it."
Used in conjunction with this ...
:)
Epic Ignore?
Well, it's the closest we've here to an 'ignore'.
Apologizes to Epic, no hard feelings?
"Every now and then I stumble on something so ridiculous that I have to share it."
Nah, too easy.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
1. I'm sure the little animation of the hammer smashing the computer has actually played out in millions of households since the release of that video. 2. Those girls are probably still asking, "Would you like fries with that?" to this day.
Blah.. It wasn't that funny then, it's still not that funny here. I'm pretty sure it still sucked when it was released.
They Do Nothing!
This takes me back to the Windows 3.0 launch in Atlanta.
Now that was something to see (Chicago played live).
256 colors on the screen, programs running in extended ram, woo!
And by "Love" I mean "Stick forks in your eyes".
Oh great, I can still hear it, but now I can't find the close window button. You bastard!
Blank until
Anyone know the story behind the ad? 5 minutes is a bit too long to be shown on TV as a commercial. Where exactly was this shown?
Beetle B.
Seriously... that is how they beat OS2.... IBM... if you couldn't beat that you deserved not to win the OS battle.
After replacing it, I couldn't find her XP disk, so I just installed Ubuntu on it.
Her first response on logging in? "This is crap, it's brown."
By the time all the drivers were loaded we frequently had around 350K to run programs. The extra memory was used to hold data. I worked in graphics at the time and there is nothing like spending all day on a large document and finding it nolonger fit in memory.
20 years from now, people are going to be laughing as hard and reminiscing at our current technology and ads for it.
"4 GB of memory, lol, amazing they could do anything with that!! Coders must have been gods back then to get any performance out of those machines. I miss those days! Sigh...."
Back in the days of DOS 5 and 6, freeing up this much memory really was a big deal. I was trying to run some BBS software at one point (I want to say Renegade, however its been a very, very long time). The program refused to run without something like over 500K of conventional memory available, maybe more, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do to get it available.
After lots of research, I found an advanced book that talked about a small 'bug' in MS-DOS' EMM386.EXE extended memory manager. EMM386 had a flag that let you include specific blocks of memory to include. For some reason, if you tacked on the A000 memory range, rather then adding this block into extended memory, it would tack it onto the end of conventional memory. Even better, any available sequential block after A000 could also be included, and it would get added as conventional memory as well as long as it was not in use.
This was hit or miss, as some systems part of the AXXX memory range was being used by the actual video card. However, IIRC more advanced video cards didn't touch this portion of memory any more. The result? Adding something like the following to config.sys:
DEVICE=C:\Windows\EMM386.SYS I=A000-AFFFF
Tacked on quite a bit of extra conventional memory. There was nothing like running the command to show memory usage (and its been too long, I don't even remember what this was at this point) and seeing >750K of conventional memory available and being used.
Ahh, memories...
One of these days i'm going to find this 'peer' guy and reset HIS connection!
My parents told me about this. They called them "sucka MC's".
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I have a copy of DOS 5 in the box. I had to visit the video to see if this was IBM's PC DOS or Microsoft's MS DOS.
DOS 5 is too generic for a title.
The truth shall set you free!
Watch the beginning: the pencil tapping, the look on the girl's face, the clock watching. Then, the music when the dancers first enter the room.
Did Britney Spears rip off an MS-DOS 5 promotional film for the "Hit Me Baby, One More Time" video?
The goggles, they do nothing!!
Ahh, the memories. The horrible, horrible memories. Excuse me while I crawl under my desk, rock back and forth and weep softly.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Until DR DOS 5 came out Microsoft was just willing to just let everyone suffer with DOS 4.11, 3.*, etc. Then as the number of DR DOS fans grew, Microsoft realized that they risked losing complete control over their platform and had to respond.
DOS 5 was pretty good, but it still wasn't as good as DR DOS 5, let alone DR DOS 6. And the only reason that they outsold DR DOS is that they dumped their product - by dropping their price from like $120 down to $29. DR DOS couldn't compete with microsoft deep pockets.
You're new here, huh?
The new memory features allowed me to play Wing Commander on my 286/12 with sound. The OS was nice and small so I could dedicate half my 40mb HD to that game. I remember making custom Autoexec and config files for some games to squeeze every last K of memory.
Good times. . .
The big news will be when MS goes after the video poster for pirating its Intellectual Property. DOS 5 sales have plummeted worldwide, and displaying this video is clearly a contributing factor. I'm surprised they haven't triggered GPFs on any Windows box attempting to play it.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Going from 8 bit computers to 16 bit computers was a giant leap forward. Compare a ZX Spectrum/Commodore 64/Apple II/Atari 800 to Atari ST/Amiga and the differences are huge. 16-bit computers were machines that you could get things done.
32-bit systems are more than enough for most tasks.
Are 64-bit systems useful? well, perhaps for specialized tasks.
So I am not holding my breath...in 20 years time, we will still have these 32-bit PCs, and a few people will have 64-bit computers and programs.
I remember when DOS 5 came out. It was supposed to be a huge upgrade to 3.3. I guess it was, it still seemed like it pretty much sucked. But since it was the best MS had to offer the one thing DOS 5 did was convince me to buy an Amiga.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Could be DOS 4. (The Windows ME of the DOS series.)
Pretty much everyone I know went from 3.x right to 5.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
...though I'm not sure if it's official ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Drive space came in MS DOS 6.
The Turtleboy video link below it (http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1754381') was far more amusing. :)
I vomited a little...
My bad memory...
DriveSpace was released in 6.2. Could have sworn it was in 5.0 that came with my 386.
Thanks for the correction.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
"Well, that really bit the big one." -- Leonard Pynth Garnell
I've written a blog that will surely make the front page of Slashdot. It is titled:
Top ten list of things that Ron Paul said about Apple products while typing on a Linux computer at an Anti-Iraq war conference.
The reason I don't read Digg often is that I want real, biased, geeky, obscure fact riddled news commented on by opinionated sysadmins!
load "$",8,1
First part out of five starring two Friends actors!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
HA!
You would never work again...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I suppose I'd better upgrade then. I could do with that extra 45kB of memory.
Paid Q&A/Research
MS-DOS 5 must have been the last time that Microsoft included a programming language with an operating system, dear old QBasic. Actually, it was in MS-DOS 6 and 7, and by definition Win95 and was what ran when you typed 'edit' at the command line. Still, how many hours were wasted throwing exploding bananas at gorillas on skyscrapers? I was so much simpler then.
I still use DOS 5 regularly... in a HP200LX palmtop, which has it in ROM.
IIRC, the drive stacking technology that wound up in DOS 6.2, was acquired from another company prior to release. I believe that technology was available for DOS 5 from the original vendor.
Of course the fact that my latest computer doesn't even have a floppy drive, let alone ISA slots, reminds me of how long ago this all was...
Did you see how happy those nerds were? Here they were waiting to get bored out of their skulls with piles of the technical jargon of how to upgrade to MS DOS 5 (It's a HIT and no PC should be without IT!©®*) and instead they were treated to a multi-media presentation complete with a nerd-core soundtrack that straight up rocked the hizzie. *Warning, "it" and all associated words are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation, may not be reproduced or read without prior written authorization. If you feel that you have become a victim of "it" piracy, please contact Microsoft Corporation via http://www.microsoft.com/piracy. Before submitting your blood test, please be aware that Microsoft has identified 238 patent violations in the human genome, although we do not intend legal action at this time.
"That was so bad I think it gave me cancer!"
"What else does it do besides look like OS/2?"
DoubleSpace came in DOS 6.0 and 6.2. It was absent from 6.21 due to some patent disputes.
DriveSpace was introduced in DOS 6.22.
This is the type of thing that NEEDS to be taken out and buried quietly in the back yard.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
That was just cruel. Cruel to the poor schmucks who were in the videos. Cruel to us who watched even a small part of it.. I can feel my brain bleeding...
Lets hope that isn't the song that's going to get stuck in my head for the rest of the day..
(Gimme 5, whoo, gimme 5, whooo)
Oh god.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Most of us probably had something like 2400 baud modems at the time to CompuServe and the like so only people at trade shows got exposed to that little work.
CmdrTaco doesn't own the site anymore. He's only paid to operate it.
:)
Yes the good news is that now he's moved on from owning the site he's now finally had a chance to catch up with his 14.4k BBS submissions inbox.... next week will bring us news on the forth coming release of Windows 3.1, 486DX/2 and IBM's long awaited ground breaking OS/2, the amazing news of stacker. And how a NeXTcube is being used at CERN as a new BBS but at a far slower speed. News of the release of something called the Linux Kernel on 17 September....
Slashdot - past news for nerds. stuff that did matter.
From the metadata :
"Boring until the 7 minute mark when the production is taken over by crack-smoking monkeys"
the LOADHIGH and DEVICEHIGH options in config.sys. They were like a dream come true.
Did you even -watch- the video? Excuse me while I finish cauterizing my optic nerves...
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
64 bits will take the world by a storm. At work (I'm an engineer) all of our computers are being swapped for 64 bit machines because - guess what - big engineering problems need lots of RAM.
Think video games. There are a lot of analogs between video games and computer simulation. I give video games 5 years before someone puts out a game that utilizes 64 bit features (including 4 or more gigs of ram), and wouldn't be suprised if it came sooner.
Sure, your word processor doesn't need 64 bits. But games will.
Why is Bob Saget in DOS training?
RTFM, Bob.
My sig sucks.
Kill me! Now! ahhhh! my eyes!
What is yomsrap?
Google seems not to know and hence it doesn't exist.
I didn't watch the video, I don't watch those online so maybe it is mentioned in it.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
From now on if... , no, *when* I have a first date, I will show the girl this video. It has good music, funky vibes and some pretty good graphics. Just because I like technology doesn't mean I can't be swinging it with the cool cats and this video should prove it.
Funky-licious !!!
At the very end it says:
Windows/386
The soul of the new machines.
Not kidding.
If DOS 5.0 came out after 1988, then we have yet another thing Microsoft ripped-off. This is basically the Rosco's Fried Chick Commerical in TapeHeads (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096223/).
... I had to go watch Ballmer dance.
>
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Back in "those days", my dad used to talk people engaging about guerrilla warfare against Ma Bell by underpaying their phone bills by $0.01 because all those people and all those bytes stored on their accounts receivable tapes was a real burden. Cheap memory takes all the fun out of it.
Ibid.
What I said.
Notice, however, that one of the selling points for MSDOS 5 was that it freed up a LOT of memory (for its time). Now, think back to yesteryear where Microsoft began saying that the minimum requirements for upgrading to their newest OS is 16 TIMES that of their previous? That is an interesting comparison. Hell, going from 2000 to XP had the same memory requirements, but to demand 16x the amount of memory just to run the damn thing....
Ahh. The first baby steps onto the upgrade treadmill. 60,000,000 customers and they'll *all* be upgrading. Do you want fries with that?
They even got the "supersizing" into the upgrade act, with countless gigs of bloat. Add any groundbreaking new functionality? No. Instead, add minor incremental improvements, don't support modern hardware in the old version, subsume third party add-ons (or outright rip them off), and leave enough flaws in the product to keep 'em coming for more.
In other words, over salt those fries (the upgrade) so they'll buy a second drink (your other products).
Now you understand the MS business model. The class in this video is "Defective by Design 101." It's very interesting to hear it sold in terms of "fast" food. It's very telling to see it so obviously pimped off to the reseller channel like this.
It'll be interesting to see if they broke the cardinal rule of upgrade 101 and did "too" good a job with XP, and whether they'll put automatic updates into the channel to slow it down or outright break applications to get people back on the treadmill.
--
Toro
Oh my god it's full of aids!
wait that's not news.
I wish I could digg down CmdrTaco.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Quoting from part 2: "Now let me show you what multi-tasking is." On Win95. ROTFLMAO!!!!! :-)
Linux user since early January 1992.
Did Bill Gates come with that himself? I could bear to watch it till the end! Good thing, he didn't play the rapper in it. Today, Microsoft marketing is the worst but this ad shows that it has at least gotten better.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
The goggles, they do nothing!!!!!!!!
Daddy, where were you when MS took over the world?
Was the wizard Dave Coulier (from _Full House_)?
And yeah, that vid was abominally funny, though I still am partial to the traditional dance of the monkey boy, as well as the KPMG theme song...
CmdrTaco must die.
Some late generation DOS games (including one of the Ultimas, I believe) required 625k or more of free memory to run. And in a system with 640k of total memory, getting this much contiguous free space was extremely difficult. The order in which TSRs were loaded had a significant impact on how much memory the system was left with, himem.sys and emm386 had to be configured correctly, etc. In hindsight, it's somewhat interesting that installing/running DOS games often required what today might be considered hacker-level system knowledge.
I'll just Copy that floppy
Ain't that the truth.
"No PC should be without it". Heh.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
When's the last time upgrading an M$ Product to a new version actually saved memory?
Yea, you're right. I didn't know if I should be barfing or rolling on the floor laughing. I think I did a little of both.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Negative, sir.
:)
:D
DoubleSpace came with DOS 6, and then DriveSpace replaced it in MS-DOS 6.22.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleSpace
You're welcome.
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
If you want a funky beat, remember kids, just don't copy that floppy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xfqkdh5Js4
...was probably done on an Amiga computer.
I couldnt finish watching it, i have a headache now.
Hey, where ya been these last 2 or 3 years?
You appear to be Passé, man.
DOS 6.22 is out now! Please let me know when its instructional video
is on Youtube.
Then maybe, I'll give you your diskettes back.
.
- aqk
F U
Very good call.
www.purevolume.com/martyd
Hey, DOS 5 was cool
Which is why I recognized Video Toaster (for Commodore Amiga) fonts in that video. I worked with Toasters for years in the broadcasting field. Apparently, DOS 5 was too cool for the world's first video workstation.
Amiga persecution complex? You bet. In 1991, I could do real-time overlays of video from different sources, and still got less Guru Meditation Errors than the BSoDs I got from any version of DOS/Windows up to Windows 2000.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Now that Vista comes with the .NET Framework pre-installed, I would guess (from looking at what ends up in the .NET Runtime on my XP machine at work) that it now comes with a C# and a VB.NET compiler out of the box, sitting in c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\2.xxxxxx. You don't get an IDE, of course, but you can write your code in Notepad (!) and compile from the command line if you like. I think they even bundle MSBuild, which is Microsoft's answer to make or ant and which can compile "projects" (which are really just MSBuild files) from the latest Visual Studio.NET.
You were an ASCII cursor eating numbers from 1-9, growing with each number, navigating through grids and tunnels.
Fast paced action requiring quick reflexes!
Up to two players at once, if you held down a button while your opponent was steering towards a wall you could make him crash into it, snickers...
"some patent disputes" as MS stole the technology from poor company, "embraced and extended" (since they know they will get sued) and bundled it to totally kill the inventor company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
That "embrace and extend" resulted in some horrible thing that today with 64 bit/multi core CPUs, filesystem/OS vendors/developers stay away from offering compress options... So, that text file which could be compressed in fraction of milisecond sits there and actually uses 100kb instead of 2 kb of space. The users are afraid to trust their data to compressed filesystem because of their horrible "embraced and extended" doublespace. I know people stays away from NTFS "compressed" flag because of their nightmares back in doublespace days.
My last two employers (both were huge corporations running NT 4.0) thought they locked down all the "games" on their PCs. That was until I launched good old QBASIC and played Gorilla War with my supervisor. Even after showing that to them, they still had no idea how to get to it, since their PC-skills severely lacked. :)