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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".
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!
I bet MS didn't plan on it sticking around quite as long as that when they made that video!
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!
If you don't use the web, create a partition for it, install Dos5, some suitably archaic wordprocessor (WP 5.1 should do nicely), and an old copy of Lotus or Quattro, then see whether you really are working faster today than you did 15 years ago. It's not as pretty, but there's something to be said for some of those older technologies. If I wasn't doing graphics and reference heavy technical writing, and just writing, I would seriously consider running something like WordStar in full screen mode. Hands never leave the home row keys, no mousing around, very little screen clutter.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Doesn't stop at users. I'm honestly baffled every time when I have a talk with a few programmers here and realize how precious little they know of the machine they're working with. Yes, they're coding in C#, some in Perl, but be honest, was there a single programmer in your time that didn't know that a "stack" is not only the pile of documents he didn't read on his table? And why a stack overflow is not only a nuisance but a danger to system integrity? Especially in a von Neumann architecture (which earns you another blank stare)?
I think that's at the very least as scary as the illiteracy we see today in users. Programmers aren't much behind in cluelessness. They have their handful of tools, and they can apply them. They know a few algos and they punch them in. Why? No idea. How they work? No idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Best DOS ever was DOS 6.20. However that contained the pirated Stak data compression software, which is why DOS 6.22 was released - to replace the better compression of 6.20 with the sucky MS-made compression in 6.22. (DOS 6.21 was like Windows XP N - Same as DOS 6.20 but with NO compression)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS#Legal_issues
I recently had to have a key card reprogrammed for our downtown parking garage. Much too my surprise, the entire system was controlled by an old 386 running dBase IV. I think it also had a dot-matrix printer for invoices. The application need some tuning however, as reprogramming the card required querying the entire database. What a pleasure to watch that old 40MB hard drive grind away for 10 minutes, and knowing I could make the same query run in less than 1 second, even on that old 386.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."