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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.
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.
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.