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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".
CmdrTaco doesn't own the site anymore. He's only paid to operate it.
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.
Well has been redfined. In absolute numbers, the sales were minimal compared to today. The channel was also a lot slower, so manufacturers continued bundling older releases (all through the fall of '91, at the very least).
I agree, especially if these are (like I believe it to be) 45K freed of conventional memory. I remember the times and can assure you 45K freed wasn't to be laughed at, but a real benefit. DOS users were often trying to cram in as much as they could in conventional RAM at one point, and 45K could be the difference of one more TSR process or not. Ah, the memories... And later joys of Quarterdeck and their QEMM, and so on.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
so here's the Youtube version.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
They also sacrificed a whole lot to get those 45kb. Forget using lots of generic objects, instead you custom code almost everything. Make all sorts of nasty shortcuts and hardcoded structures that make expandability a mess. You may have heard of the "y2k" problem which was only one of many symptoms. Time was wasted not improving the software, but making small optimizations.
Today you have tons of prefabricated libraries and code. Creating, organizing and assembling those to quickly and effectively make complex, stable, expandible, feature-rich, user-friendly applications using a minimum of time and money is a very real skill - even if it's not that same skill. I think your dad's generation would be rather shocked by the requirements of what you should do in a 6 month project.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you can stand listening through to the finish, somewhere near the end they talk about selling this upgrade with new systems, and how every system purchaser will want one, like "do you want fries with that?" So this was obviously targeted at sales reps the dealer channel. I used to work in computer sales right about the time of this video, and we always received tons of stupid sales promo videos like this.
It was also the death knell for Stak Electronics with the release of DriveSpace in 5.
It is amazing how hyped corporations get over this crap. The whole part on how much money corporations would make never really transpired. It really translates into the money Microsoft made.
As far as advertising goes, this one sucks!
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.
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.
Drive space came in MS DOS 6.
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.
I, too, remember making custom AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to play games on my then-screaming 386SX/20 and 486DX/33.
.BAT and .SYS files I needed to play that naffing game!"
They were not good times. They were tedious, painful, and aggravating times. To this day, when people mention the video game Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Final Unity, I shudder and say "Yeah, and it took me most of a Sunday dialed into the ISP I ran, searching Alta Vista to create the custom
For those reasons alone I was happy to embrace Windows 95 games. They made my life sane again.
"'My Country Right or Wrong'is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober,'" -- Chesterton
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.
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/).
Oh, I don't know - I found that once you had them set up for an Origin game, you could run pretty much everything else. The only decision was whether or not to load the mouse driver, and then every so often you had to screw with the number of Files and Stacks (iirc) to get something to run.
we no longer need to make space tradeoffs
Problem is, many programmers today fail to realize a space tradeoff is a time tradeoff as well.
Memory+disk is very slow compared to modern CPU's and this means that anything, including bloat, that pushes even one byte of core code out of the level one cache will cause the whole program to be an order of magnitude slower as the cache thrashes.
A user's time is important to them and all programs that interact with a user need to be as fast as possible. To put it another way; the computer is there to serve the user, not vice versa.
Programmers who don't understand this are a problem. It's only entertainment software that can rightfully waste a user's time and even then it has to entertain while it does it. Why do you think people are always complaining about bloatware? e.g. Do a system call trace on most "modern" applications and you'll see an amazing list of completely unnecessary file accesses drastically slowing startup.
You seem to have forgotten how horribly unstable most code was prior to the mid-1990s.
Actually, the reverse is true. Modern applications are what's unstable. Most programmers today wouldn't know what a race condition was if it jumped up and bit them. The complexity of interaction amongst all these mega-libraries is lots of fun (not!) also.
Stability was equivalently poor prior to the mid-1990's not because of coding practices but because a certain popular OS didn't have memory protection.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.