DOS 5 Upgrade Video

Re:News? by Aladrin · 2007-09-12 02:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

Because CmdrTaco posted it and IT'S HIS SITE. Go make your own site so people can complain about what you post on it.

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Re:News? by Jeff+DeMaagd · 2007-09-12 02:37 · Score: 4, Informative

CmdrTaco doesn't own the site anymore. He's only paid to operate it.

Re:News? by Xiaran · 2007-09-12 02:38 · Score: 5, Funny

I *will* make my own site. With Blackjack! And Hookers! In fact. Forget the site.

Hey, DOS 5 was cool by Anonymous Coward · 2007-09-12 02:38 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by oliverthered · 2007-09-12 03:16 · Score: 1

did you ever try DR DOS?

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by g4b · 2007-09-12 03:27 · Score: 1

yeah, because of such cool thinks like QEMM you really dont need more than 640K *ever*
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by penix1 · 2007-09-12 03:40 · Score: 2, Insightful

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 problem with your statement is that QEMM was made by Quarterdeck not Microsoft. Microsoft had emm386 as their memory manager. It was far below the capabilities of QEMM.

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by ArsonSmith · 2007-09-12 03:53 · Score: 2, Funny

Ha, They didn't have a snappy beat and rhyming video.

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by KlomDark · 2007-09-12 04:03 · Score: 4, Interesting

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
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by TheRaven64 · 2007-09-12 04:09 · Score: 1

Much better than 4. To be fair, DOS 3 was also much better than DOS 4, which was a disaster best forgotten.

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by Shrubbman · 2007-09-12 04:28 · Score: 1

Damn straight 6.2 rocked! I still have my old install floppies for it (well, technically a set of 6.0 install floppies along with the 6.2 upgrade disc).
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by hackstraw · 2007-09-12 04:38 · Score: 1

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 never considered DOS an operating system (or at least much of one) because it didn't do much memory management and other hardware management and what it did do, it didn't do very well. It was common for applications to access hardware directly and having to write their own device drivers instead of going through the "OS".

I shake my head when I think about that DOS thing.
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by Anna+Merikin · 2007-09-12 05:00 · Score: 1

H'mmm. I r'member those days. Seems to me I tweaked Qemm and DOS-5 to show ~703Kb under 640k. Eventually, I moved on to DR-DOS, which was able to free more than 720k "under 640.

Virtual memory made of RAM chips, run through a 64kb page file window. What a dull idea....

Oh, it's still being used?
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by onemorechip · 2007-09-12 05:05 · Score: 1

Hmm, I wonder if all the odd versions of DOS are better? This would be the opposite of World Wars and Star Trek movies, where the even ones are better.

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But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by suv4x4 · 2007-09-12 05:49 · Score: 1

Best DOS ever was DOS 6.20. However that contained the pirated Stak data compression software

If you'll link to Wikipedia article, at least bother reading it. There was never pirated software in DOS 6.20.

It was a patent issue.
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by The+One+and+Only · 2007-09-12 06:25 · Score: 1

Did Microsoft receive a series of vague threats from the patent holder? Did the patent holder make a specific deal with, I dunno, Tandy or Compaq or Packard Bell to protect customers from these vague patent threats before Microsoft gave in? Is Microsoft only paying forward the same abuse it received in its formative years?

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by kc2keo · 2007-09-12 06:53 · Score: 1

Gimme 5!...
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by jellomizer · 2007-09-12 07:01 · Score: 1

In that case I would think most developers would use the time to create a New OS other then sticking with DOS for too long. That or standarized hardware again. The problem is that modern PC are not like their older DOS brothers. For Display you had CGA, EGA, or VGA. Printers were Epson Compatible, Modems were Hayes compatible. Heck pure Dos on a modern computer would probably be useless. Because you will need a CDRom TSR but the only external device DOS supports are floppy disks. What would happen is there will be an OS rewritten to take drivers again and not with DOS. No matter how nostolgic you are with DOS it is basicly a Dead OS (meaning will never regain it glory days)

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by kuzb · 2007-09-12 07:03 · Score: 1

You rock, not only did you get your facts wrong, but you then linked to an article proving yourself wrong. 1) It's "Stac" not "Stak" 2) It was not a question of piracy. RTFA.

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BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by jmauro · 2007-09-12 07:23 · Score: 1

I think the issue was specific, crediable threats from a patent holder. Stak had already taken MS to court and won hence the 6.21.
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by WilliamSChips · 2007-09-12 07:23 · Score: 2, Funny

Dude, World War Six sucked.

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by JoelKatz · 2007-09-12 08:09 · Score: 1

Don't know which command to use?
Just click on our drop down menus.
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by Syrinx_87 · 2007-09-12 09:28 · Score: 1

Haha, I have a copy of DOS 4 that's still boxed and plastic wrapped!

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by phiwum · 2007-09-12 09:30 · Score: 1

Is FreeDOS a "pure" DOS? Does it run reasonably well on modern computers?

(This is not a rhetorical question. I've never tried it.)

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by operagost · 2007-09-12 09:33 · Score: 1

DOS 6 came with the MSCDEX packet driver, so all you need is the IDE device driver which was pretty much generic by 1997. Microsoft packed a boot diskette with full copies of Windows 9x on CD-ROM that contained CD-ROM device drivers.

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by rjason · 2007-09-12 09:56 · Score: 1

631 was all i could get out of it, but i guess thats because I'm not a geek
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by GPL+Apostate · 2007-09-12 11:13 · Score: 1

Recently I came across the source archive for DR-DOS, which they released for a while, quite awhile ago. Back in the good old 'Caldera' days. It's a much more convoluted build than FreeDOS today.

But if you're serious about Digital Research, you want to run CP/M-86. Or CP/M-80 if you're also a vintage hardware enthusiast.

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Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by GPL+Apostate · 2007-09-12 11:16 · Score: 1

The PC-DOS 4.0 diskettes I once possessed are one of the things I regret no longer having. I believe I had two complete different sets, the original disaster version and the 'update' version which wasn't any better, really.

We all hung on waiting for 5.0 to come along. I still use PC-DOS 3.3 on a few machines at work.

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Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by GPL+Apostate · 2007-09-12 11:20 · Score: 1

I recently created a DOS boot diskette with PCMCIA card services installed on it. It's useful for installing a system on old laptops that have no CDROM drive. Put all your installers on a compact flash, stick it in a PCMCIA converter and boot the diskette. The Card Services installer is still downloadable if you dig around enough. I believe I found it on Toshiba's Canadian tech support download site.

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Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by Pharmboy · 2007-09-12 12:02 · Score: 1

He didn't say QEMM was made by MS. He said by adding it, it was better. I think you were reading more in the comment than was there.

As to QEMM, I ran multiline BBS's on both IBM DOS 4 and MS DOS 5 and QEMM. There was a insane difference, even with just 2mb ram and an even more insane amount of hand tuning to get three instances of the BBS with a single shared RAM drive for overlay files. (Ezycom)

The difference between 4 and 5, imho, was greater than any other single version, including 6.x

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by Ex-MislTech · 2007-09-12 13:42 · Score: 1

Ahem....take a look at file # 141 in this torrent...

http://btjunkie.org/torrent/MS-DOS-PC-DOS-DR-DOS-Etc-BIG-Collection/3562e5ceb5c0956646911e1af23d4b09afb5a17c599e/download.torrent

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google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by Ex-MislTech · 2007-09-12 13:45 · Score: 1

Hmmm the link won't work, but if you got to the site and enter "pc-dos" in the
search you can then click a link that "will" work.

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google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by nocomment · 2007-09-12 14:52 · Score: 1

Please. Stop tempting people to go watch this video.

People, move along. Think of the children.

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Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by onemorechip · 2007-09-13 05:25 · Score: 1

Whaddaya expect, after WW Five there wasn't anyone left on the planet but mutants and zombies.

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But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by GPL+Apostate · 2007-09-14 10:40 · Score: 1

That's cool and all, but that's just a warez binary. A collector wants to see original disks and the printed manual.

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Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool by KlomDark · 2007-09-21 03:00 · Score: 1

OK, ya got me on the spelling. No argument there. :)

But at the time, the battle was over Microsoft having put Stac code (or at least their patented approach) into DOS 6.20 without properly licensing it. Sounds exactly like what the record companies say about people obtaining music/movies without properly licencing it, aka piracy, thus that's why I selected the word "pirated" in my posting. So on your #2 argument I disagree with your statement that I was wrong.

The marketing geniuses... by catdevnull · 2007-09-12 02:38 · Score: 3, Funny

The marketing geniuses who brought you this video live on in Redmond. Who else would design a brown media player and name it "Zune?"

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I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...

Re:The marketing geniuses... by metlin · 2007-09-12 02:40 · Score: 2, Funny

And have it squirt?

Oh yeah, baby. Squirt your brown Zune for me.
Re:The marketing geniuses... by Applekid · 2007-09-12 02:43 · Score: 4, Funny

Surely those on the Zune marketing team aren't holdovers from the DOS 5 days, right?

Can't watch it at work, but is it any more hallucinogenic than this Windows/386 promo video?

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More Twoson than Cupertino
Re:The marketing geniuses... by fbjon · 2007-09-12 03:13 · Score: 1

I'm not sure. I've watched the 386 commercial, but this one... this one is so painful I couldn't stand more than a couple of minutes.

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True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Re:The marketing geniuses... by Waffle+Iron · 2007-09-12 04:00 · Score: 1

Thanks for finding that. I saw it at work when it originally came out, and we all thought that it was just about the strangest promo we'd ever seen. It contains what is certainly the worst "rap" performance ever captured on film (starting at about 7:10).
For almost 20 years now, every time I've seen the term Windows/386, that stupid jingle "I've got Wu-Wu-Wu Windows Wu-Wu Windows Windows/386!" has popped into my head.
Re:The marketing geniuses... by usrusr · 2007-09-12 05:33 · Score: 1

reminds me of barbara brockhaus

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[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
Re:The marketing geniuses... by chochos · 2007-09-12 07:49 · Score: 1

I couldn't watch the w/386 commercial completely. Had to stop after she starts rapping, it's way worse than the dos5 rap...

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Go hug some trees.
Re:The marketing geniuses... by fbjon · 2007-09-12 07:54 · Score: 1

Ok, I admit I did skip forward in that one too. I think the pure shock kept me watching for a few minutes, I simply couldn't reach the mouse because my jaw was in the way.

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True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Re:The marketing geniuses... by empaler · 2007-09-12 08:00 · Score: 1

In a way, the DOS 5 commercial is more fun than Win/386 - however, there's more mileage in Win/386, whatwith the random clothes changes and impossibly worse rap than DOS 5.

At least the DOS 5 commercial admits openly that it's a revenue stream.
Re:The marketing geniuses... by jra · 2007-09-12 10:37 · Score: 1

It *is* clear that the purpose of that tape was to pump up *retail salespeople*, right?

It wasn't customer focussed at all.

It does show the truth, though, of Dave Barry's assertion that the secret to Bill Gates' collection of approximately 247 personal jet airplanes, is....

"upgrades".
Re:The marketing geniuses... by kaizokuace · 2007-09-12 10:48 · Score: 1

"Heh, what else does it do besides look like OS/2" omg what year was this? Certain things produced in the 80's can never be made again! And that is a sad thing.

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Balderdash!
Re:The marketing geniuses... by StikyPad · 2007-09-12 13:32 · Score: 1

Actually, that was made in the 90s.

BTW, also I half expected the chick to yell T-BONE PERRRRKINS!

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Re:The marketing geniuses... by StikyPad · 2007-09-12 13:36 · Score: 1

Oops, my mistake.. I believed Digg without checking my facts. I should be shot.

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https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Re:The marketing geniuses... by Fizzl · 2007-09-12 17:26 · Score: 1

Christ...
Your link was even worse.
Holy shit. How many attrocities have they committed?

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Re:Fail by Pope · 2007-09-12 02:38 · Score: 1, Funny

Epic Retry?

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Forget Vista! by Billosaur · 2007-09-12 02:39 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

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Re:Forget Vista! by deeblite · 2007-09-12 03:13 · Score: 1

Suspect? It originally shipped on a single 3.25" floppy.
Re:Forget Vista! by Hokie06 · 2007-09-12 03:22 · Score: 2, Insightful

Suspect? It originally shipped on a single 3.25" floppy. Thats why I never upgraded to DOS 5, it required me to upgrade my floppy drive.

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Kilroy was here.
Re:Forget Vista! by Frumious+Wombat · 2007-09-12 03:34 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

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the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Re:Forget Vista! by BiloxiGeek · 2007-09-12 03:45 · Score: 1

Talk about proprietary, I've never even heard of a 3.25" floppy drive.
3.5"? Sure, worked on lots of those.
5.25"? Same thing
8.5"? Yep, had two installed in a comm terminal connected to AUTODIN back in my USAF days.

But I've never seen a 3.25" floppy drive or disk.

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Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
Re:Forget Vista! by 50000BTU_barbecue · 2007-09-12 04:34 · Score: 1

Do some Googling before mouthing off.

http://retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/325_inch.jpg

Also, *I've* never heard of 8.5" disks....

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Mostly random stuff.
Re:Forget Vista! by King_TJ · 2007-09-12 04:41 · Score: 5, Insightful

It was just last year, I did an on-site service call for a small business owner. He said his printer quit working and he wanted it repaired. It turned out, he had an old Epson dot-matrix printer, and the reason he wanted it repaired, rather than just replaced, was because it was paired up with a 386 class desktop PC running MS-DOS. (I think he was actually "current" with version 6.22 though, not 5. Heh.)

The only thing he did with this PC, since it was new, was business-related work, including Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets and printing address labels from some address label software. (MyMailList Pro I believe)

It was amazing how functional and productive this arrangement really was for him. As he pointed out, the old dot-matrix printer ribbons were FAR cheaper than inkjet cartridges, and he didn't need better print quality for address labels or for reports generated from spreadsheets.

He could pull up his software and start working in less time than it takes Windows to boot, even on a really fast, modern PC. With no Internet connectivity, he had almost zero worry about a virus or spyware messing things up -- and running DOS, he didn't even have to mess with regular software updates, requiring reboots and all.

(We actually did managed to fix his printer, by buying another broken one off eBay that had a different issue. His just had a dead power supply board in it.)
Re:Forget Vista! by BiloxiGeek · 2007-09-12 05:19 · Score: 1

Gee I guess you need to learn some english since I said
I've never heard of .

Had I said it doesn't exist maybe your reply would make more sense.

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Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
Re:Forget Vista! by Drinking+Bleach · 2007-09-12 05:41 · Score: 1

I actually have an 8" floppy disk around here somewhere, but no 8.5"...
Re:Forget Vista! by digitig · 2007-09-12 06:07 · Score: 1

Good luck cutting that 80Gb drive into 2Gb Fat16 chunks (you'll run out of drive letters) Who cares? What would you put on them all anyway? At least, what would you put on them that the apps that ran on MS-DOS 5 could deal with?

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Re:Forget Vista! by GPL+Apostate · 2007-09-12 11:24 · Score: 1

I have an 8" floppy drive within five feet of me. A newish one, even (half-height).

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Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
Re:Forget Vista! by demonlapin · 2007-09-12 11:27 · Score: 1

Why not just get a new printer? They are still made, you know.
Re:Forget Vista! by GPL+Apostate · 2007-09-12 11:32 · Score: 1

I recently got an older Dell Optiplex from IT at work because I needed another Data Logger in the lab. The data logging application had been running on an IBM-XT and I was getting tired of running on such aging old hardware. Even though it was kinda neat to still make use of a dual-floppy disk system in a modern product development lab (it had a 5-1/4" DSDD boot drive and a 3-1/2" HD B: drive where the logged data was stuck. It had one of those now-rare High Density 8 bit diskette controller cards with a BIOS extension on board)

When I got the new Optiplex (a PII box) it had a 128M SDRAM and an 8 gig hard drive. I booted up DOS 5 on it, ran FDISK to clobber the old partitioning and stuck just a 200MB partition on it. I don't need more space than that, and why waste the extra 20 minutes formatting a 2048M partition?

So it happily now runs DOS 5 and probably will until *IT* is so obsolete that it is falling apart. The only requirement is that it has an ISA card slot for the data acquisition card needed, so it is probably the newest hardware that will ever sit in that spot in the lab.

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Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
Re:Forget Vista! by El_Oscuro · 2007-09-12 12:22 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Re:Forget Vista! by tehcyder · 2007-09-14 00:21 · Score: 1

Am I allowed to make the "I wish I had a floppy 8 1/2 inches" joke?

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To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Re:Forget Vista! by deeblite · 2007-09-17 03:18 · Score: 1

5.25" is in fact what I meant. Brain fart.

The Windows 386 Promo Video is better. by Joe+The+Dragon · 2007-09-12 02:40 · Score: 3, Funny

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4915875929930836239

Re:The Windows 386 Promo Video is better. by Reality+Master+101 · 2007-09-12 03:30 · Score: 1

Good God. At times like this watching both these videos, I'm reminded of a famous quote by Steve Jobs (paraphrase): The biggest problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste.

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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Re:The Windows 386 Promo Video is better. by Javi0084 · 2007-09-12 03:49 · Score: 1

Don't you mean worse?

Gah by Anonymous Coward · 2007-09-12 02:40 · Score: 1, Funny

I watched it.
I hate you now.
Happy?

Those were the days by Anonymous Coward · 2007-09-12 02:40 · Score: 2, Interesting

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!

Re:Those were the days by Locutus · 2007-09-12 04:34 · Score: 1

wasn't that in the 1991 timeframe? IIRC, DOS was so yesterday by that time and if you wanted real multi-tasking, and multi-user, UNIX 386 was the way to go. I've still got my copy of Consensys UNIX 386 diskettes and remember installing it over hours of floppy swapping. Included networking and X-Windows GUI system and the multi-user part was cool so your roommates could also use the PC from VT terminals( cheaper ). I was heavy into SCSI disks and peripherals back then too since MFM was so slow for a multi-tasking system.

That was the time I realized how crappy Microsoft software was but also realized how the UNIX software market was hurting itself by doubling the price for the UNIX software. I remember WordPerfect for DOS was ~$250 and the UNIX version was $500. That sucked but in a multi-user setup, splitting the cost helped. Shortly after this, I also looked at the new Windows called NT while already messing with OS/2 v2 betas. OS/2 blew NT away in all respects. Windows 95 was a joke but Microsoft sucked the press/world into thinking it was something new . Once Windows 95 shipped, they directed hundreds of millions more in marketing over to NT to pretty much bury OS/2 and Netware in the higher end and server markets. Marketing genius but technology dolts, that's Microsoft yesterday and today.

So I too remember DOS 5. It was so 'yesterday' on the day it shipped. Reminds me of Windows Vista. ;-)

LoB

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"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus

Back when people could actually code.. by onion2k · 2007-09-12 02:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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http://twitter.com/onion2k

Re:Back when people could actually code.. by lucifig · 2007-09-12 02:48 · Score: 5, Funny

I know it, back in my day we coded by punching holes in little cards! In the snow! And we loved it!
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Jugalator · 2007-09-12 02:51 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by smithcl8 · 2007-09-12 02:58 · Score: 1

Thanks for clearing up my overall concern with computers taking over the world! It's a relief to know that current programming skills are nowhere near as good at 20 years ago, and that, by extension, the ones 20 years from now won't be as good as yours are now.

By 2030, there shouldn't be a usable piece of software in the world! Hooray technology!
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Kjella · 2007-09-12 02:58 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by value_added · 2007-09-12 03:07 · Score: 1

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.

Speaking as someone from those olden days, here's something else to consider. I don't know a single computer user from that era that doesn't have a good understanding of how computers work. That includes secretaries who, when not filing or painting their fingernails, spent their working hours in a command-line environment. And they liked it. ;-)
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by dada21 · 2007-09-12 03:15 · Score: 1

QEMM was awesome, especially under DESQview with a 386. The problem on my 286 (12 Mhz with Turbo button, of course) was that it had extended memory, not expanded, so it didn't work with QEMM. The 386, OTOH, worked great. My first multinode BBS ran 6 nodes under DESQview and I still had more than enough processor speed to do some basic text gaming in another window. XDV.com was in my autoexec.bat by default.

Ahh, the days of the 640k cap. Remember "real-time" memory compression software? Ugh.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Anonymous Coward · 2007-09-12 03:21 · Score: 1, Insightful

We have it easy and we do more than ever before. Call it lazy all you want, all that extra power is going towards greater levels of abstraction, increasing security and flexibility (in theory).

Highly complex software goes to market faster than ever, thanks to the base we're building on. Don't pine for the glory days when that base wasn't even there. We're in an age where Microsoft has to be able to write a real server OS, where Apple has a real multitasking/memory management system, where Linux does everything plus 2 kitchen sinks (one written in GTK+, one in QT), where IBM is plugging Java and fostering cross-platform solutions. We don't have to build everything from the ground up. Does that come with a serious amount of overhead? Hell yes!

Just don't wish too hard for the days where you had to build your whole base before you could even start to build an application.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Opportunist · 2007-09-12 03:40 · Score: 5, Funny

And uphills! Both ways, to and from work, too! And we didn't have those fancy things called shoes, today you wouldn't go into a server room without your boots, we went in there barefooted. And did it harm us? When we wanted to know if a computer is on, we had to touch its wire, no fancy flashing lights and all the other goodies you have today! When the modem died, I had to sit there for hours and whistle in 300 baud what was on the screen! Yes, 300 baud, and we were GLAD we had that kinda speed! And no fancy debuggers either, we just watched the code fly by and we knew EXACTLY what it did. Wasn't that hard when your whole code has to fit into less than what you got as cache on your CPU today. Oh, and there was only ONE program running at a time, and you had to wait for yours to run. What do you mean "on my machine"? You didn't have one, there was ONE machine for the company, and it was in the basement. Rather, it WAS the basement! When it was cold, and it was often cold because we couldn't afford heating EITHER, that was just after the war, remember, we had NOTHING (ok, except kickass expensive computers)... where was I? Right, when it was cold, we'd huddle together between the tubes (no, Timmy, not the Tubes of the Senator, that Senator didn't exist... ok, he did, but at least he kept his yap shut back then) to stay warm.

Hey. HEY! Where d'ya think you're going? (muttermutter) Spoiled brat...

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Opportunist · 2007-09-12 03:45 · Score: 1

In good ol' DOS, "conventional" ram was treasured and valuable. We all know the "640k is enough for everyone", and that was the corner stone of all that was inconvenient. Because, no matter how much ram you had, whether it was 4m or even 16m (you rich bastard), you only had 640k conventional. And of course, all those TSR programs you had nibbled away on that precious few 640k.

So you had like 20 different configurations. One for everyday work. One for those applications that needed extra much ram. One for those that needed a ton of ram, but also a mouse. One for those that needed CDRom. One for those that needed Mouse and CDRom (no, just one that had Mouse and CDRom was no option, since that would invariably leave you with less ram than the application that needed Mouse but no CD (or vv) needed to run.

45k was often not only the difference of having one more TSR running, it often also was the difference between being able to run a program and not being able to.

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by multipartmixed · 2007-09-12 03:46 · Score: 1

HA!

My 6-node BBS ran with a Cyrix 486 DLC over clocked to 42 MHz! But it did start out as a 386/25.

How did you get COM5 and COM6 working? I mangled the address lines on an ISA serial card for mine and snaked over the 16-bit IRQs from a different slot. BNU FOSSIL.

Did you have two monitors going? I used to run real work from VGA and the board from the hercules card. Also handy when playing with Turbo Pascal.

--

Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Varitek · 2007-09-12 03:49 · Score: 1

45kb was a lot.
It wasn't so much that it was a lot - it was that by the time you loaded a mouse driver, maybe a cd driver, himem.sys, and all that, some programs just wouldn't load in low mem. I spent hours fiddling with the order stuff loaded in to get some games to run, and finding a mouse driver that only took 6k instead of 18k was a god-send. I had four or five copies of autoexec.bat tailored for different games; in the end, DOS 6 introduced a menu system to take the hassle out of it.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Opportunist · 2007-09-12 03:57 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by dada21 · 2007-09-12 03:57 · Score: 1

I wrote a multinode door in Turbo Pascal called Wilderness Adventure. Sort of a text based ANSI version of Ultima, with ideas stolen from The Pit. The multiplayer communicated via temp transaction files (.FLG is what I called it) and the other nodes would constantly search for new FLG files then delete their particular incoming files. All done on a ram drive, of course. Talk about churning, but it worked (sort of) with a delay.

As for the COM ports, I was high tech -- we used a Digiboard which overcame many of the IRQ issues. We did use BNU Fossil for a while, but Digi's drivers were phenomenal under DesqView. I think our boards supported 16 ports.

Eventually we tossed DV and moved to MajorBBS because it was really well handled for multinode. That was an awesome programming experience in C, the last time I will ever touch a programming language again, especially a multinode thread-based one :)

No multi-monitors, here. My first LAN was based on the God-cursed LANtastic, and I had more than enough PCs in my room/office. Hercules was terrible, high res green screen? Ack. Talk about burn-in, hah.

Multinode gaming BBSes > 0-day warez systems.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Wylfing · 2007-09-12 04:10 · Score: 2, Funny

Get offa ma lawn!

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Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Anonymous Coward · 2007-09-12 04:10 · Score: 1, Insightful

How did idiotic nonsense like this get modded up??? You do not have to write crap just because your memory is limited. It you had actually written code in that era, like some of us, you'd know that!
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by raddan · 2007-09-12 04:49 · Score: 1

You don't get it. The point is that, for most software projects, we no longer need to make space tradeoffs, since we have [comparably] vast amounts of dynamic memory available. We can now spend our time making our programs better, and optimize for space or speed only when those particular traits are necessary. Code reuse goes way, way up, because now, when someone writes a graphics library for a paint program, hey, now you can make it generic enough use it someplace else, like a window manager, even on other platforms, ala GTK+. This leads to better code because more people are looking at and using it, and in the end, it leads to a better computing experience.

He's not saying that you *had* to write crap code to make things work. He's saying that there are far fewer excuses to do so nowadays. You seem to have forgotten how horribly unstable most code was prior to the mid-1990s.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by poot_rootbeer · 2007-09-12 05:06 · Score: 1

Coders today are right lazy bastards.

I think you mean "right PRODUCTIVE bastards".

The coder in 2007 can deliver a feature-complete small product in the same time it takes the coder in 1987 just to draw out a memory map to determine where each chunk of code or data ought to be loaded.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Verteiron · 2007-09-12 05:13 · Score: 1

And don't forget how some apps/games needed Expanded memory, and some needed Extended memory (which EMM386 made mutually exclusive), and then some games wouldn't run at all if you had a memory manager loaded. And then dos4gw came along...

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End of lesson. You may press the button.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Just+Some+Guy · 2007-09-12 06:29 · Score: 3, Funny

I'm certain that someone of my Dad's generation who wrote software in the olden days (1960s/70s/80s)
I'm not that old, son. And your mother and I were wondering if you'd given any more thought to finding your own place.

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Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by WilliamSChips · 2007-09-12 07:30 · Score: 1

I wish for the alternate universe where microkernels and capability systems won.

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Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by sharkey · 2007-09-12 08:41 · Score: 1

Damn youngsters with their 6 digit UIDs. In my day, all we had were 5 digits and we LIKED it.

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--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by empaler · 2007-09-12 08:41 · Score: 1

My father used to program punch cards.
If he's an accurate example of what happens to programmers late life, I'm quitting computing and taking up a trade.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by kabz · 2007-09-12 08:46 · Score: 1

The great irony is that all the things that made LISP useful in the 50's now make it a near perfect language for today. Great abstraction, objects, super efficient compiled code, libraries. And yet ...

And yet ... a large chunk of those benefits are available in languages with a syntax much closer to C, and those languages are cleaning up. Ruby, Python, Javascript. Personally though, I'm starting to build programs in Javascript that coincidentally have a web-UI, simply because of tools like JSLint, and great libraries like Prototype (think doing Haskelly stuff in Javascript) and jQuery (think Web 2.0 without the pain).

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-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Antiocheian · 2007-09-12 10:27 · Score: 1

I think you have an entirely different kind of software in your mind; the are still people working on Freedos and they achieve even lower memory footprints than DOS 5, using modern programming techniques with all the benefits you describe.

You probably have business applications in your mind, that's different.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by demonlapin · 2007-09-12 11:21 · Score: 1

Green? Amber, baby, amber. Soothing to the eyes.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by bit01 · 2007-09-12 11:35 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

---

Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by lsllll · 2007-09-12 13:03 · Score: 1

I don't know if you guys remember Quarterdeck's Desqview. It was the first multitasking piece of software in DOS and allowed multiple programs to be ran, not simultaneously, but swapped in and out of RAM/hard disk and kinda allow you to multitask. I remember spending hours and hours setting up all my programs so that they could work under Desqview. If you had expanded memory, that was GREAT since you didn't have to swap to disk. Ahhhh, those days, and the kind of things programmers had to do with such little hardware resources, and what they accomplished. It puts us to shame.

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Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Koiu+Lpoi · 2007-09-12 14:23 · Score: 1

Dude... at my university (WMU), we learned that stuff 1st semester of Computer Engineering. Where the hell are these people coming from?
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by denobug · 2007-09-12 14:37 · Score: 1

You are right! Today it doesn't take much to become a "programmer" to program in C# and Java. Script kiddies got out of trade school start programming things they have no idea about, only following someone's example and under the instructions of someone else. They are truely writing codes only, with no regards to exactly how the computer works.

I have came across a web developer in charge of server administration. As a senior staff of an IT department she cannot distinguish the difference between Mega-Hertz and Mega-Bytes in computer hardware specification. Makes you wonder if they truely knows what they are doing or just taking vendor's advertising for granted, word by word.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by jstomel · 2007-09-12 15:27 · Score: 1

We programed in ones and in zeros! And sometimes we ran out of ones! I wrote a perfectly good program using nothing but zeros. And we were glad of it! Back when Fortran was not even Onetran...
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Frantactical+Fruke · 2007-09-12 20:38 · Score: 1

One of the funniest shortcut used by Microsoft coders was mentioned in a Windows 3.0 internals book, in which the author had partially disassembled the code. He found one function with a jump into the middle of an instruction word: When you started reading it from the second byte on, it formed a wholly different instruction. I just bet the coder felt he was God when he thought of that space saving optimization. We can only hope that he died on the pitchforks of an enraged mob of code maintainers...
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Opportunist · 2007-09-12 21:27 · Score: 1

So do you here. Those are people who've never seen a college from the inside.

In the wake of the dot.com hype, "computer schools" popped up that cram a few basics of programming into you and spewed you into the world. From there, we get people who know a few codeblocks of php, perl or even C#, but have no idea what's happening in the machine with their code, and few know what that block of code actually consists of. That way you get "database engineers" who stare at you blankly when you ask them to design a database in third normal form.

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by Kjella · 2007-09-12 21:39 · Score: 1

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.

I think the latter is more true than the former. Yes, I know what a race condition is. No, thanks to the level of indirection I don't understand that this leads to a race condition. The mental distance between a programming class and a real-life situation can be very far.

As for stability, developers cause bugs in whatever they're building. Now they write buggy glue code instead of buggy assembler, but I think I remember the "bad old days". In the old days, it didn't matter if you rebooted because you were mostly/only single-tasking anyway, you'd boot up DOS and whatever you were running was it. Now it's like "#%# you killed my dozen applications, browser windows, background tasks and whatnot". When you're not reinventing the wheel, at least you can't screw up that part so I think it's gotten somewhat better.

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Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:Back when people could actually code.. by raddan · 2007-09-13 02:57 · Score: 1

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.

Yes and no. Sure, a user buys a computer to get a certain job done. But programmers also have to be able to write code that is maintainable.

For example, modern languages now have a boolean data type. The actual bit-length of this data type depends on the platform and compiler, but usually you're talking about an entire word of computer memory. Back in the 80s and early 90s, this flagrant misuse of memory would have been frowned upon, to say the least. A whole word for a single binary number?! But 'bool status_is_on = TRUE;' is a lot easier to understand, a lot faster, and a whole lot easier to maintain than an implementation of a packed array.

That old code, filled with packed arrays (which also tends not to be portable), inline assembly, hacks for platform quirks, etc, was a nightmare to maintain. Powerful applications would have been extremely difficult to build-- when the code base reached a certain size, it simply became unmaintainable. People complain that programs like Firefox are getting bloated. Perhaps this is true. But consider what Firefox does: it has to deal with network I/O, it has a cross-platform GUI, it has to be fast, it has to be able to work with Java VMs and JavaScript environments, it has to be able to parse at least a dozen variants of markup, it has to understand MIME types, and then pass them off to a library that can render or play them inline. Browsers are complicated! Dillo is probably one of the fastest and most lightweight browsers out there, but you know what? It doesn't do much, either. If it ain't straight HTML 4, it can't render it.

Now, I agree that plenty of programmers probably don't understand on-die memory vs. RAM vs. disk, and this negatively affects many programs. Many programmers probably don't know how to do algorithm analysis, and this also affects many programs. But to say that programmers aren't what they used to be may be true, but misleading. Programs and computers aren't what they used to be either. I think time would be better spent teaching programmers safe programming practices than optimization practices. The former is much more in need than the latter.

I love the fact that... by Ransak · 2007-09-12 02:45 · Score: 2, Funny

... the artist is "YO! MS Raps".

--
"Powers. I have them."

Re:I love the fact that... by CaptainCaustic · 2007-09-12 03:30 · Score: 1

...this video starts out like some pornos I've seen. But alas, my hopes are quickly trashed.

And it sold rather well, did it not? by objekt · 2007-09-12 02:45 · Score: 1

Certainly must have sold better than Vista. Are people getting smarter?

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-- Boycott Shell

Re:And it sold rather well, did it not? by cnettel · 2007-09-12 02:51 · Score: 2, Informative

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).
Re:And it sold rather well, did it not? by XSforMe · 2007-09-12 02:54 · Score: 1

PCs were not that prevalent back then, but to answer your question: YES! DOS 5 was a major upgrade and sold like pancakes. It was the first time you could actually buy the thing, before that you either bought a new computer or pirated it. Feature like undelete and unformat were well worth the money back then.

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My other OS is the MCP!

CollegeHumor by greedyturtle · 2007-09-12 02:50 · Score: 1

Putting a joke on ./ is all well and good, but one on CollegeHumor.com is certainly a low point...

Still going strong... by Retron · 2007-09-12 02:50 · Score: 5, Interesting

Scary stuff: 17 years later, if you're running Vista 32-bit, pop open a command window and type:

command /c ver

I bet MS didn't plan on it sticking around quite as long as that when they made that video!

Re:Still going strong... by Dimentox · 2007-09-12 03:26 · Score: 1

C:\Documents and Settings\xxxxxxx>command /c ver MS-DOS Version 5.00.500 C:\DOCUME~1\xxx>

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string sig = llGetSig("dimentox"); llSay(0,sig);
Re:Still going strong... by Nonillion · 2007-09-12 10:58 · Score: 1

Same results with Windows 2000!

C:\ command /c ver

MS-DOS Version 5.00.500

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"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Re:Still going strong... by drawfour · 2007-09-12 18:36 · Score: 1

That's because it's running command.com, not cmd.exe. command.com is the old MS-DOS command interpreter, and they have left command.com in for backwards compatibility. It's the same on Vista as well.

DOS 5 was GREAT! by MooseDontBounce · 2007-09-12 02:50 · Score: 1

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.

Re:DOS 5 was GREAT! by Corporate+Troll · 2007-09-12 03:03 · Score: 1

Ehm, DOS 3.11 did not exist.... You're confusing with Windows for Workgroups. In the DOS 4 days, everyone kept DOS 3.3 or DOS 3.1. The best DOSes that existed were DOS 3.3, DOS 5.0 and DOS 6.22... And now FreeDOS, which rocks compared to all those.
Re:DOS 5 was GREAT! by TRS80NT · 2007-09-12 03:05 · Score: 1

Right you are. DOS 5.0 also broke the Point Oh jinx. Before DOS 5 no .0 version of any M$ product was considered stable enough (yet) to be taken seriously. For a few months there it was an era of good feeling toward Redmond. Ahh, the days.

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Re:DOS 5 was GREAT! by jonadab · 2007-09-12 03:08 · Score: 1

> I know I'm showing my age here but DOS 5 was GREAT.

My memory says it was buggy.

> 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.

DOS 4 was so bad, scarcely anybody ever even saw it. It's pretty much a footnote. But DOS 5 was fairly buggy itself. After 3.3 (which was rock solid), the next version of DOS that I'd consider reasonably stable was 6.2.

On the other hand, DOS 5 did introduce some useful features, not least dosshell, which provided task-swapping capability almost as good as Windows 3.x. (You had to do more setup, like telling it how much RAM to allocate for each process, but once you got things going it was really not bad.) Also, for those who had not already obtained a good third-party freeware text editor (yeah, all three of you), the text editor that came with DOS 5 was a quite major improvement over EDLIN. In fact, I don't think Microsoft has really materially improved on that text editor since, unless there's a new one in Vista I don't know about. For Windows 95 they separated it into its own executable (rather than having it embedded in QBasic), but other than that it's pretty much the same. And there's Notepad, which is better integrated with the OS, but it's actually considerably worse in several other ways.

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Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Re:DOS 5 was GREAT! by Nibs+Niven · 2007-09-12 03:25 · Score: 1

"DOS 4 was a hugh piece of crap that IBM force upon Microsoft." That's news to me. How did this happen, and why?
Re:DOS 5 was GREAT! by dosius · 2007-09-12 03:35 · Score: 1

5.0 *was* buggy.

MS released 5.0 revision "A" with file dates of 11/11/1991 and IBM released 5.0 revision "1" in 1992 to fix a couple problems with FORMAT and a couple other tools. I also remember SETVER worked poorly on the original release.

-uso.

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What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Re:DOS 5 was GREAT! by Bomarc · 2007-09-12 04:06 · Score: 1

Some history of MS DOS....
Wish I had time for the long version but.... DOS 3.1 - 3.3 was stable, IBM released PC DOS 4.0, buggy as hell. MS said "what???" - and fixed some of the bugs for MS DOS 4.01. MS DOS 5.0 was rock stable; many of the so called 'bugs' were in fact bugs in the applications that were now showing up. V5 was fairly short lived (although it was popular) as MS released MS-DOS 6.0, which introduced MANY new bugs, thanks to a *VERY* bad and annoying PM. But it sold; and MS was sued by Stacker for the compression technology, and lost. (Yet another interesting story, Wikipedia only glosses over it. Oh, to have the text from that phone call again!). This begot MS DOS 6.21, and MS DOS 6.22. Also Winkipedia history is wrong: There never was a "MS-DOS 4.0 - June 1988 - derived from IBM's codebase rather than Microsoft's".
Re:DOS 5 was GREAT! by felipekk · 2007-09-12 10:37 · Score: 1

FreeDOS does not rock. It can't play an old game I like that runs under "DOS 4GW", but, heck, neither can DOS 6.22. Have to install Win98 unfortunately.
Re:DOS 5 was GREAT! by jonadab · 2007-09-12 13:50 · Score: 1

> MS DOS 5.0 was rock stable; many of the so called 'bugs' were in fact bugs in the
> applications that were now showing up.

Apart from bugs in new features (which it's not fair to pick on too much, since DOS 3 didn't have the features in question at all), the key issue that I still remember is an extremely annoying bug in the handling of floppy diskettes, particularly when you changed diskettes, especially if you only had one floppy drive, or only one of the type in question (e.g., only one 5.25" drive), which was becomming increasingly common around that time. You'd issue the drive-letter directive (e.g., A: and hit enter) to signal the OS to re-read the diskette in case you'd inserted a new one, and the OS would get confused. My memory of the details has finally begun to fade (at long last), but IIRC the bug would not manifest the first time you changed floppies, but subsequently it would, especially if you were using more than two diskettes altogether in the same drive during the same session. I don't know if the bug was new in DOS 5 or a remaining bug left over from DOS 4, but I do know that it was *not* present in 3.3, *was* present in all 5.x versions and in 6.0, and was fixed in 6.2.

On the other hand, I also know that DOS 6 has no problem installing on, booting from, and using a SATA hard drive, even though Windows 95 won't touch it with a ten foot pole.

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Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Re:DOS 5 was GREAT! by Corporate+Troll · 2007-09-12 19:27 · Score: 1

DOS4GW ran fine on DOS 5.00 and 6.22...

Besides, FreeDOS does support DOS4GW. Perhaps that game does something strange and actually requires Win98. (Doesn't work under Win95?!?)

FreeDOS is better than any MS DOS or PC DOS that I have ever used. I've also deployed robot controlling software for a DOS machine that died. They didn't have their MS DOS disks anymore, so I installed FreeDOS and the required programs. Works like a charm...
Re:DOS 5 was GREAT! by Corporate+Troll · 2007-09-12 19:30 · Score: 1

This might be your problem. I've never had problems with DOS4GW on FreeDOS, but hey, apparently some do.

CollegeHumor link is almost Slashdotted by CaptainPatent · 2007-09-12 02:52 · Score: 3, Informative

so here's the Youtube version.

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Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.

Re:News? by hauntingthunder · 2007-09-12 02:53 · Score: 1

well compared to dos 4 5 was a much better release

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You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim

Wave of nausea... by ivaldes3 · 2007-09-12 02:54 · Score: 1

Must not get sick, must not throw up... -- IV

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http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.

apt-get install msdos-5.0 by capnkr · 2007-09-12 02:54 · Score: 1

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

Re:Fail by Anonymous Coward · 2007-09-12 02:56 · Score: 1, Funny

Epic Ignore!

Re:News? by Anonymous Coward · 2007-09-12 02:57 · Score: 5, Funny

Do you always take your dick off before you offer a rebuttal?

Taco by slapout · 2007-09-12 02:58 · Score: 2, Funny

"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

Re:News? by SolitaryMan · 2007-09-12 03:00 · Score: 1

Read just above comments:

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Since comments are a valuable part of the site, no, this is not "his", or "their" site now. It's ours.

--
May Peace Prevail On Earth

A couple of things by Nero+Nimbus · 2007-09-12 03:00 · Score: 4, Funny

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.

Tough love indeed. by Farmer+Tim · 2007-09-12 03:02 · Score: 4, Funny

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 /. makes another boneheaded UI decision.

Re:Tough love indeed. by kuzb · 2007-09-12 06:55 · Score: 1

That's just the red screen of death you're seeing. Please reboot yourself.

--
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.

5 minutes? On TV? by Beetle+B. · 2007-09-12 03:02 · Score: 1

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.

Re:5 minutes? On TV? by sakusha · 2007-09-12 03:12 · Score: 3, Informative

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.
Re:5 minutes? On TV? by toddestan · 2007-09-12 15:28 · Score: 1

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.

The thing that still confuses about that part of the video me is what good would an upgrade version do for people buying a new system? I'm not sure what they were getting at with the whole bundling thing myself, unless they were basically telling people to pirate it or something (I'm pretty sure back then the upgrade version worked on the honor system).
Re:5 minutes? On TV? by sakusha · 2007-09-13 13:23 · Score: 1

I think at the time of that video, a lot of systems shipped with DOS 4something and MS wanted to push DOS 5 out fast. I had a lot of customers just buy the cheaper upgrade with their new PC, instead of the full price DOS 5 package that you were supposed to buy.

oww.. my eyes.... my eyes.... by p14-lda · 2007-09-12 03:02 · Score: 4, Funny

Seriously... that is how they beat OS2.... IBM... if you couldn't beat that you deserved not to win the OS battle.

Re:oww.. my eyes.... my eyes.... by Opportunist · 2007-09-12 05:00 · Score: 1

It could well be that they decided that they'd rather lose that battle than look so stupid. I mean, they may have lost the war, but at least they still have their dignity.

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:oww.. my eyes.... my eyes.... by Guppy06 · 2007-09-12 05:34 · Score: 1

No, this is DOS 5; it is IBM. The MS/IBM split didn't start until DOS 6.x.

Re:News? by TheOldSchooler · 2007-09-12 03:03 · Score: 2, Insightful

Hey it's better than the 12, count 'em, 12 consecutive non-stories posted by kdawnson that are on the frontpage right now.

Brown is the kiss of DEATH by Dr_Barnowl · 2007-09-12 03:05 · Score: 5, Funny

My wife's laptop drive died recently.

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."

Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH by AndyCR · 2007-09-12 03:14 · Score: 1

First step whenever I install Ubuntu for anyone: Put a blue wallpaper, Human-Deepsky skin, and Tango icons on it.

--
If there's anyone I hate more than stupid people, it's intellectuals.
Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH by Fujisawa+Sensei · 2007-09-12 03:30 · Score: 1

Brown as a default? I thought Ubuntu was supposed to be user friendly Linux?

--
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH by garett_spencley · 2007-09-12 03:54 · Score: 2, Funny

First thing my wife did after I set up Ubuntu was go searching her old Windows drive for a background image to replace the default. She eventually settled on a Sailor Moon background and began exclaiming loudly "I am not a geek!" over and over. :/
Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH by simong · 2007-09-12 03:59 · Score: 1

A friend of mine replaced XP with Ubuntu on her PC because she liked the colours. *shrug*
Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH by Locutus · 2007-09-12 04:00 · Score: 1

open up Synaptic and find kubuntu-desktop and install it. For good or bad, KDE is easier for Windoze users and the defaults are not brown.

You'll also be one click away from removing Novells Gnome/.Net stuff when Microsoft claims their patented IP is there.

LoB

--
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH by gzerphey · 2007-09-12 04:44 · Score: 1

Ran into the same problem. This fixed it: http://arthuran.net/20070709/hello-kitty-ubuntu-theme

--
I don't have a microwave. I do, however, have a clock that occasionally cooks shit.
Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH by dintech · 2007-09-12 05:20 · Score: 3, Funny

All this talk of women. You know this is slashdot, not dos 5 fan fiction.
Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH by AragornSonOfArathorn · 2007-09-12 07:29 · Score: 3, Funny

Just be thankful the startup sound isn't the Brown Noise.

--
sudo eat my shorts
Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH by corbettw · 2007-09-17 14:36 · Score: 1

She eventually settled on a Sailor Moon background and began exclaiming loudly "I am not a geek!" over and over. That's comedy gold, right there.

--
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.

45K helped allot back then by guidospork · 2007-09-12 03:05 · Score: 1

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.

Re:45K helped allot back then by TheRaven64 · 2007-09-12 04:24 · Score: 1

What kind of drivers were you loading? On my Pentium system, I had a good 550KB of base memory free with sound, CD, mouse, VESA, and network drivers loaded. With the 386 it replaced (which didn't have a CD drive, network interface, or sound card), I usually had at least 610KB.

--
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Re:45K helped allot back then by guidospork · 2007-09-12 04:49 · Score: 1

You had a Pentium with something older than DOS 5?
I'm refering to 286s running 3.4.
We had scanners and stepper controlers connected to these machines. The scanning software actualy ran in Windows v1.x.
When 5 cam out the memory that was opened greatly improved my day.
Re:45K helped allot back then by TheRaven64 · 2007-09-12 05:16 · Score: 1

My Pentium ran DOS 6.22 dual booted with NT 4. The machine it replaced was a 386, which came with DOS 4. This machine had less of a problem running out of base memory because it didn't have to load MSCDEX or sound card drivers (since it didn't have the hardware). It needed a mouse driver, but that was it. Very little else took up base memory.
The machine that replaced was an 8086, which only had 640KB of RAM (and ran Windows 3.0 quite well in spite of this). Here the problem was total memory, rather than base memory. You couldn't use things like loadhigh to move things out of the base region to the 640KB-1MB region, because there was no memory there. I remember the splash screen for Commander Keen saying it had something around 350KB of RAM free (which was enough for the game).

--
I am TheRaven on Soylent News

Just remember by flynt · 2007-09-12 03:09 · Score: 3, Insightful

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...."

Re:Just remember by mashade · 2007-09-12 03:27 · Score: 1

The funny part isn't really the specs on the machines, it's the fact that they have a rapping professor and a do-wop trio of girls to back him up.

Artist: Yo! MS Raps

Excuse me while I go gouge my eyes...

--
Technology tips and tricks.
Re:Just remember by Dunbal · 2007-09-12 03:27 · Score: 2, Insightful

20 years from now, people are going to be laughing as hard and reminiscing at our current technology and ads for it.

+++++++++++++++IMTF++++++++++++++++
The scary thing is, 20 years from now people might look back and envy us being able to do whatever we wanted with our computers:

Dear citizen, due to your recent visit to the following website: 208.195.75.5, on 9-12-2027 at 0154 UTC according to our logs, your internet privileges have been withdrawn. This website has been flagged by the government for promoting and inciting unpatriotic behaviour.

Please report to your local police station for processing within 72 hours of this notice, or you will be considered a terrorist sympathizer.

This is an automated message generated by the Internet Monitoring Task Force. Please do not respond.

--
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Re:Just remember by kryten_nl · 2007-09-12 03:32 · Score: 1

Let me go out on a limb then: "1TB of memory should be enough for everyone" - Me, JustNow

--
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
Re:Just remember by krakelohm · 2007-09-12 03:33 · Score: 1

Yea I think the reason this is hilarious is because off the presentation. Nothing like rapping the content's of a press release.

--
You are all a bunch of idots.
Re:Just remember by glwtta · 2007-09-12 04:24 · Score: 1

Coders must have been gods back then to get any performance out of those machines. I miss those days! Sigh....

Unlikely, I haven't seen to many coders get any performance out of these machines recently. Whatever shape software engineering takes in the futures, I really doubt we'll be remembered as a Golden Age. (although Age of Mostly Incompetent Hacks does have a ring to it...)

--
sic transit gloria mundi
Re:Just remember by Just+Some+Guy · 2007-09-12 06:38 · Score: 1

4 GB of memory, lol, amazing they could do anything with that!
I don't think so, at least not in the same sense. If you're running out of memory now, it's generally because you've loaded a dataset that's too big. Running out of memory "back in the day" meant that you couldn't physically squeeze another opcode into RAM, or that you had to remove a feature if you needed to store another 8-bit variable.

There's really nothing you can't theoretically do with a 128MB system today (save for loading ME2); you just won't be able to process as much data at once as on a larger system. You'll still have plenty of room to hold a reasonable number of executables in memory at the same time.

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Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Re:Just remember by Lumpio- · 2007-09-12 08:08 · Score: 1

Year 2027 and /still/ stuck using IPv4? Do not want...

Freeing up 45K by kupekhaize · 2007-09-12 03:10 · Score: 3, Interesting

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!

Re:Freeing up 45K by Dunbal · 2007-09-12 03:19 · Score: 1

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)

It was (tadaa): mem

Yeah we all used to celebrate the day we were able to load our mouse drivers and whatnot in "high" memory. I remember playing the excellent F-16 sim "Falcon 3.0", but this game was EXTREMELY fussy because it required something like 620K (out of our 640!) to be "free". If you didn't have the right set up to move most of your drivers (mouse, sound card, etc) to "high" memory, it just wouldn't load. At one point people realized that in fact the OLDER version of the mouse driver took less memory (around 10k) than the newer (the beginnings of Microsoft bloat?), so most people who played this downgraded their mouse drivers to the previous version.

Anyway, another useless bit of trivia from a bygone age.

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Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Re:Freeing up 45K by jmanforever · 2007-09-12 03:32 · Score: 1

"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)..."

mem

still works, as far as I know. It works on this Win2K machine.
Re:Freeing up 45K by g4b · 2007-09-12 03:41 · Score: 1

funny to hear about all those old memories tweaking DOS up, because back then also things got developed which didn't care much about KB's in the OS: with Norton Utilities (I think I installed under DOS5 back then) all those fancy Kbs got eaten up again to 533K or sth like that, just so you could have fancy ascii letters and bright colors in the shell. It was called "NORTON DOS" or "NDOS" and still don't know what it was for. It replaced command.com simply.

I can still hear my maths teacher looking back at the one PC standing in our class and shouting: "You have installed the norton commander?" taking a deep breath and showing with some anger in his voice, how much he likes it.

later i wrote a shell wrapper in pascal and called it GDOS. it had those fancy colors too and still gave you more than 600K. It didn't work however to rename the exe and replace command.com with it ;)
Re:Freeing up 45K by multipartmixed · 2007-09-12 04:02 · Score: 3, Interesting

That worked because you were stealing RAM below "intended" for certain other things, like video cards, SCSI BIOSes, etc.

Originally, address 9fff:ffff was supposed to be the top of memory, but you could move that around. Just like moving the top or bottom of BASIC on a Commodore 64. Nothing special about the memory, it just has to be contiguous, installed, and unused.

Anyhow. The A000 block was used for VGA memory. But, if you didn't have a VGA card, and you could slide the top of DOS memory to 0xafff:ffff, you got another 128K of conventional RAM. Assume your high mem area was actually populated (e.g. you had 1024KB or more RAM installed, excluding LIM EMS cards).

B000 was for MDA (hercules) video.
B800 was for CGA.
C800 for your hard disk controller. (remember, debug g=c800:5?)

I think SCSI controllers usually wound up around e000, and the system BIOS around f000. But it's, ah, been a while.

--

Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Re:Freeing up 45K by TheRaven64 · 2007-09-12 04:39 · Score: 1

I remember the big problems caused by the first LAN party I went to. Everyone had carefully tweaked autoexec.bat and config.sys files that gave them enough memory to run games. By this time, sound drivers and MSCDEX (and the CD driver itself) also had to be loaded, making it even harder, but everyone had managed. Then we all needed to install the network drivers, which took another 10-15KB. A few people were ended up having to choose between CD or network drivers; installing a game took two reboots.
Memories like that remind you of what a stupid decision IBM made to go with Intel's brain-dead architecture for their PC.

--
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Re:Freeing up 45K by QuebecNerd · 2007-09-12 04:52 · Score: 1

Same here... I ran a Wildcat! BBS in the early 90s and every single KB counted. The best I could do was with the QEMM memory manager by Quaterdeck and running their Desqview software to do multitasking DRDOS wich was bought by Novell during these years! I had 2 modems per PC and about 15 PCs before I bought my first terminal server and turned into a full ISP in 1995. Almost every option; games, message reader, etc in BBS software were called DOORS and exited to a DOS shell to provide the service. You can imagine the various levels of software running one atop another so indeed, every kb counted.
Re:Freeing up 45K by Opportunist · 2007-09-12 05:10 · Score: 1

But back then you at least could! Not like you have to reinstall your graphic card driver (erh... which one? Never mind) just because you decided you wanted your old mouse driver back, and your soundcard didn't suddenly go silent because of that decision.

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:Freeing up 45K by zakezuke · 2007-09-12 05:52 · Score: 1

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. I just ran dos in monochrome mode. That lifted the conventional memory limit from 640k to I believe 702K IIRC. But the memories of what a mess the dos days really were. Everything required a driver. a .sys or a tsr. It was a balancing act between what you needed to do at a given time and what you could have running at a given time. It didn't help the fact that most programmers were lazy having 640k to play with thinking in terms of single use applications.

--
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Re:Freeing up 45K by JayAEU · 2007-09-12 20:42 · Score: 1

IIRC, most of those drivers and TSRs could be loaded into high memory using the loadhigh (or lh) directive in config.sys and autoexec.bat. DOS even came with its own optimizer called memmaker to free up conventional memory.
Re:Freeing up 45K by NaDrew · 2007-09-13 11:56 · Score: 1

It was (tadaa): mem
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp. C:\WINDOWS\system32>mem 655360 bytes total conventional memory 655360 bytes available to MS-DOS 598224 largest executable program size 1048576 bytes total contiguous extended memory 0 bytes available contiguous extended memory 941056 bytes available XMS memory MS-DOS resident in High Memory Area

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Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
Re:Freeing up 45K by rpresser · 2007-09-24 02:53 · Score: 1

It was easy to use up ALL of your HMA as well, if you had lots of stuff to load. "High memory area" doesn't mean everything over 640K; it means specifically the 64k just past one megabyte.

I know this! by porkThreeWays · 2007-09-12 03:10 · Score: 2, Funny

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.

Brandless? No MS by Technician · 2007-09-12 03:11 · Score: 1

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!

Re:Brandless? No MS by Ritchie70 · 2007-09-12 05:00 · Score: 1

Oh yeah? Well I have a set of DOS 5 diskettes in my bin at work that people actually BORROW and USE for things.

--
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Re:Brandless? No MS by KillerBob · 2007-09-12 05:42 · Score: 2, Funny

Oh yeah? Well I have a set of DOS 5 diskettes in my bin at work that people actually BORROW and USE for things.

Hey Ritchie... we forgot our frisbee at home again and have nothing to do for lunch break. Can I borrow that disk again?

You laugh. But those 5.25" disks really can fly. It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

--
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Re:Brandless? No MS by Ritchie70 · 2007-09-12 15:25 · Score: 1

Actually, we've got somewhere around 66,000 MS-DOS systems up and running that we support. Mostly 6.22 but some are 5.0 and some are PC-DOS 7.

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The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Re:Brandless? No MS by Technician · 2007-09-12 18:12 · Score: 1

You laugh. But those 5.25" disks really can fly. It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

Dude, you don't want my PC DOS 5. It is on 3.5 inch disks. You want to borrow my MS DOS 3.20. Would you rather borrow my CPM disks? Those 8 inch disks go even further.

--
The truth shall set you free!

Memories by Selfbain · 2007-09-12 03:18 · Score: 4, Funny

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.

Re:News? by athdemo · 2007-09-12 03:21 · Score: 1

It's news because it was on G4 yesterday.

DOS 5 was a poor response to DR DOS 5 by kpharmer · 2007-09-12 03:22 · Score: 1

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.

um, yeah. by mattdm · 2007-09-12 03:26 · Score: 1

You're new here, huh?

Re:News? by penix1 · 2007-09-12 03:28 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

How About Piracy? by Tiger4 · 2007-09-12 03:31 · Score: 4, Funny

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.

Re:News? by _xeno_ · 2007-09-12 03:31 · Score: 4, Insightful

Funny - I'd consider this story to be "classic Slashdot." Stories like this one are what Slashdot is all about! If you want only serious tech news, well, I'm sure there's a site out there for you. Slashdot isn't it.

--
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.

It's not the same by master_p · 2007-09-12 03:34 · Score: 1

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.

Re:It's not the same by cnettel · 2007-09-12 03:41 · Score: 1

Graphics can easily use 512 MB. We'll see more 1024 MB GPUs soon. That memory needs to be mapped. Not mapping all of it directly in RAM (possibly even twice, both in kernel and some in user space) will cause the same kind of bloat and pain that "expanded memory" did for us on 16-bit x86.
Re:It's not the same by TheAwfulTruth · 2007-09-12 03:46 · Score: 2, Insightful

Wow, did you actually just say "4 Gig should be enough for anybody"?!?!?

Dud you have NO IDEA where computers will be in 20 years, but one thing that is sure, 4 gig will be NOTHING.

--
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Re:It's not the same by glwtta · 2007-09-12 04:18 · Score: 1

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.

Are you serious? We've been running into the limitations of 32-bit machines for years. Almost all new servers coming out now are 64-bit, and in a couple of years virtually all desktop PCs will be as well.

Now, 64-bit might stick around for a while, yes, I am not repeating the mistakes of the past when I say that 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes should be enough for anyone, for a while, at least (it's not like the progression is linear, and you do run into some physical limitations after a while).

But 32-bit machines in 20 years? That's just silly.

--
sic transit gloria mundi
Re:It's not the same by petermgreen · 2007-09-12 05:40 · Score: 1

Virtually every machine sold today is 64 bit capable. 1 gig of ram is now standard with 2 gigs not unusual and more reasonablly common so the 4 gig limit is now perilously close to the ammount of ram that is in consumer machines.

The problem is this time round MS hasn't released a transition OS. They expect everyone who want's to run a 64 bit apps to have 64 bit drivers for everything. Right now for most people the pain isn't worth the gain but as software bloat and game graphics sizes continue to rise eventually people will have to bite the bullet. MS has made the transition even more painfull by enforcing signed drivers in win64.

--
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Re:It's not the same by EvanED · 2007-09-12 07:02 · Score: 1

...the 4 gig limit is now perilously close to the ammount of ram that is in consumer machines.

Well, keep in mind that 32-bit OSs should be able to use Intel's PAE to address 64 GB of memory. The memory space usable by one process would still be limited to 4 GB (minus OS stuff, so 2 or 3 GB on Windows), but it would put off the wall by a couple more years, as one of the reasons you want more memory is to run more processes, not to give individual processes more space. So PAE would help that.

Of course, even Vista doesn't support PAE and is so limited to 4 GB physical memory. I personally find this mind boggling, and wouldn't be surprised if either they change that in a service pack release or it comes back to bite them.
Re:It's not the same by petermgreen · 2007-09-12 12:33 · Score: 1

IMO what is really needed is an OS that is mainly 32 bit but with support for more memory and running 64 bit apps. Sort of like win32s allowed you to run 32 bit apps on 16 bit windows. I don't know how feasible this is with the amd64 architecture though. ~~~~

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note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Re:It's not the same by drsmithy · 2007-09-12 20:15 · Score: 1

Well, keep in mind that 32-bit OSs should be able to use Intel's PAE to address 64 GB of memory. The memory space usable by one process would still be limited to 4 GB (minus OS stuff, so 2 or 3 GB on Windows), but it would put off the wall by a couple more years, as one of the reasons you want more memory is to run more processes, not to give individual processes more space.
Not really. Most people only "run" a single program at once and some _games_ are already getting close to bumping into the 2GB process limit in Windows.
Of course, even Vista doesn't support PAE and is so limited to 4 GB physical memory. I personally find this mind boggling, and wouldn't be surprised if either they change that in a service pack release or it comes back to bite them.
It doesn't for the same reason XP doesn't - compatibility and reliability. *LOTS* of low-end consumer hardware (and/or drivers) breaks on systems running in PAE mode.
Re:It's not the same by petermgreen · 2007-09-13 00:06 · Score: 1

It doesn't for the same reason XP doesn't - compatibility and reliability. *LOTS* of low-end consumer hardware (and/or drivers) breaks on systems running in PAE mode.
Is there some way to enable it anyway and if not how do you know what it breaks?

--
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Re:It's not the same by corbettw · 2007-09-17 15:06 · Score: 1

So I am not holding my breath...in 20 years time, we will still have these 32-bit PCs Yeah, but not much longer after that.

--
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Re:It's not the same by petermgreen · 2007-09-23 22:35 · Score: 1

ok found it http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx seems you have to specify /PAE in boot.ini

--
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register

Best MS had to offer by Fujisawa+Sensei · 2007-09-12 03:34 · Score: 1

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.

Re:Best MS had to offer by Ilgaz · 2007-09-13 03:42 · Score: 1

I laughed at that video but when I checked the other offerings when that junk making mouse big deal shipped, I got plain sad....

DOS 5 released in 1991...

First of all- Amiga 3000 exists (1 year old) and 1200/4000 ships 1 year later.

Apple already shipped System 7 featuring these:
Cooperative multitasking, virtual memory, personal file sharing, QuickTime, and QuickDraw 3D.

People have actually chosen that backwards junk over these offerings and technologies.

Could be worse... by FlyByPC · 2007-09-12 03:35 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

Re:Could be worse... by james_shoemaker · 2007-09-12 03:54 · Score: 1

Could be DOS 4. (The Windows ME of the DOS series.)

Pretty much everyone I know went from 3.x right to 5.

Except for those of us who needed to access large drives and hit 3.3's 32Meg limit. I was using 650M seagate drives at work at the time writing CD authoring software and DOS 4 was a godsend, much better than the hacks we had to use before DOS 4 (disk manager and EZ-drive).

James
Re:Could be worse... by AVee · 2007-09-12 04:32 · Score: 1

I didn't and I still regret it.
Re:Could be worse... by TheRaven64 · 2007-09-12 04:44 · Score: 1

650MB? Seriously? How much did that cost? The machine I owned that came with MS DOS 4 has a 60MB hard disk; a DOS 3 machine with a 650MB drive must have been insanely expensive (mind you, I didn't even have a CD reader, let alone writer, at that time).
My 8086 ran DOS 3. The 20MB disk it replaced with had been replaced with a 40MB one, so I had an 8MB C: boot disk and a 32MB D: disk with Windows 3.0 and a load of DOS apps on it. 32MB seemed like a lot back then. I didn't run out of disk space for quite a while. Now, my mail directory is two orders of magnitude bigger than that...

--
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Re:Could be worse... by demonlapin · 2007-09-12 11:33 · Score: 1

Well, the guy *was* authoring cd's ca. 1990... I suspect he had a rather larger budget than you and I did.

Re:News? by catbutt · 2007-09-12 03:37 · Score: 4, Insightful

The possessive does not only refer to ownership. I do not own my mom, but she is still my mom.

Being the founder/creator of something makes the term "his site" appropriate.

And the Windows Vista one is even better... by cliveholloway · 2007-09-12 03:39 · Score: 1

...though I'm not sure if it's official ;-)

--
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism

Re:And the Windows Vista one is even better... by Locutus · 2007-09-12 04:59 · Score: 1

that was hilarious. But that fancy new machine should have had cold cathode lighting installed behind the case window. Especially with all the features it came with for installing Vista. ;-)

LoB

--
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus

Re:News?.... Minor correction by Bomarc · 2007-09-12 03:41 · Score: 2, Informative

Drive space came in MS DOS 6.

Turtleboy by C_Kode · 2007-09-12 03:44 · Score: 1

The Turtleboy video link below it (http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1754381') was far more amusing. :)

ugh by Ryzzen · 2007-09-12 03:44 · Score: 1

I vomited a little...

Re:News?.... Minor correction by penix1 · 2007-09-12 03:49 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

"Exquisitely bad." by EdZep · 2007-09-12 03:50 · Score: 1

"Well, that really bit the big one." -- Leonard Pynth Garnell

Getting out of hand by fishthegeek · 2007-09-12 03:53 · Score: 2, Funny

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

Re:News? by notthe9 · 2007-09-12 03:55 · Score: 2, Insightful

The point stands...he's the one who operates it.

Re:Hey, give it some respect by kionel · 2007-09-12 03:58 · Score: 2, Informative

I, too, remember making custom AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to play games on my then-screaming 386SX/20 and 486DX/33.

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 .BAT and .SYS files I needed to play that naffing game!"

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

Windows 95! by antdude · 2007-09-12 04:03 · Score: 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).

poor bastard by Ralph+Spoilsport · 2007-09-12 04:09 · Score: 2, Funny

Imagine being an actor and having THAT on your demo reel.

HA!

You would never work again...

RS

--
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.

(sigh) by ribuck · 2007-09-12 04:11 · Score: 2, Funny

I suppose I'd better upgrade then. I could do with that extra 45kB of memory.

--
Paid Q&A/Research

I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas by simong · 2007-09-12 04:11 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Re:I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas by raddan · 2007-09-12 04:55 · Score: 1

What makes me sad is thinking about how many hours I spent porting programs written in TI Extended BASIC to QBASIC. Total waste of time. What's worse is not what I had to learn, but what I've subsequently forgotten.
Re:I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas by porkThreeWays · 2007-09-12 05:15 · Score: 1

I hear this a lot, but while Windows doesn't come with any real way to compile, write, interpret, whatever, programs; programmers back then would be amazed at how many free ways there are to write software in the cutting edge of languages. In fact, I think we've reached the point where I'd say you can create programs in most programming languages for free.

--
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Re:I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas by coult · 2007-09-12 06:12 · Score: 1

I had an Amiga 1000 back in the late 80's/early 90's... I wanted to learn C, but I couldn't get a C compiler without paying $$$! So I hand-wrote programs on paper, without compiling, in preparation for the day when I would actually have access to a compiler.

--
All is Number -Pythagoras.
Re:I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas by EvanED · 2007-09-12 07:09 · Score: 1

Agreed. I wanted to teach myself C after doing QBASIC and also Visual Basic for a while, but I couldn't find a compiler I could get working.

I found one called DJGPP (still around; it's a port of GCC for DOS), but didn't know how to get it set up. I'd be curious to look at the documentation I had to work with at the time and see how much was due to poor docs and how much was due to me not knowing about a lot of stuff. (I'm not sure I really knew about environment variables then, and in retrospect, this was probably the biggest issue.) The only way I was able to get programs to compile was to put the .c file into the bin/ directory, copy any include files from include/ to bin/, then write, for instance, #include "stdio.h" instead of #include . I got very frustrated with it and put it aside for some number of years until I took a class in C++.
Re:I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas by Ben+Hutchings · 2007-09-12 10:16 · Score: 1

Windows comes with the "cscript" and "wscript" front-ends to VBScript and Javascript, and there are many scriptable components in the OS.
Re:I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas by demonlapin · 2007-09-12 11:31 · Score: 1

It wasn't trivial to set up, but the docs were IIRC decent. I used it a few times.
Re:I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas by grumling · 2007-09-12 15:34 · Score: 1

I used to write in 6502 assembler by hand writing the opcodes, figuring out the HEX equivalent and looking up the correct letters in ATASCII. Then I'd write the characters to Page 6 and execute a USR() command in Atari Basic. Look! Fancy colors!

What a waste of time!

--
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Re:I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas by os2fan · 2007-09-12 19:42 · Score: 1

QBasic was 'upgraded' in DOS 6.x (to version 1.1), and it was included in all DOS 5 derivitives until Windows 2K. It's in Windows NT4 and earlier, and it comes with the cd version of Windows 9x.
Interestingly, i tested some VBA code in qbasic, so it was useful that way, and with helpmake, it is possible to rewrite help.hlp to get your own help code. I kept my notes in this form after Word 6.x decided it was going to do the microsoft thing.

--
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.

I still use it by tapanitarvainen · 2007-09-12 04:14 · Score: 1

I still use DOS 5 regularly... in a HP200LX palmtop, which has it in ROM.

I think you're half right. by pragma_x · 2007-09-12 04:14 · Score: 1

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...

I'm sold! by SonicTheDeadFrog · 2007-09-12 04:15 · Score: 1

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.

To quote the immortal Calculon... by glindsey · 2007-09-12 04:17 · Score: 1

"That was so bad I think it gave me cancer!"

Re:News? by lpangelrob · 2007-09-12 04:21 · Score: 4, Funny

It was also the death knell for Stak Electronics with the release of DriveSpace in 5.

Heh. And DriveSpace was the death knell for my 500 MB hard drive when I was poking around in DOSShell...

What is this 478 MB file doing on my F drive? I need to get rid of it. <reboot> Oh crap...

--
-Rob

Biblical fiscal responsibility

Re:News?.... Minor correction by creepynut · 2007-09-12 04:24 · Score: 1

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.

Wow, that was tragic by Arcturax · 2007-09-12 04:26 · Score: 1

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

Re:News? by michrech · 2007-09-12 04:41 · Score: 1

No, MS-DOS 5 had a virus (michaelangelo? - it was on my media...) on some of the 5.25" floppies. 6 had the stolen tech from Stac Electronics (named Drvspace), and 6.2 "fixed" that problem, and was renamed to dblspace.

With a quick search of google, I wasn't able to find any references to the MS-DOS 5 5.25" disks (well, some of them) having a virus from the factory, but I do remember that it was being reported in the media at the time. The MS-DOS entry on wikipedia doesn't seem to have anything on it, either. :(

Oh well..

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!

--
bork bork bork!

MSDOS 5 by JWSmythe · 2007-09-12 04:41 · Score: 2, Funny

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.

Re:MSDOS 5 by iroll · 2007-09-12 17:29 · Score: 1

That's all I came here to say. These videos are painfully awful.

--
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR

Re:News? by phoenixwade · 2007-09-12 04:42 · Score: 2, Insightful

Do you always take your dick off before you offer a rebuttal? That should have been modded "Funny"... Oh, well, too many people with no sense of humor. I plan on filing this one away, that remark will become a classic.

On topic:

Yeah, this article is news or, rather, it's appropriate for slashdot. It's a bit of classic nerd stuff, a walk down memory lane, if you will. And it serves to remind us of a time when Microsoft wasn't hiring pro marketing companies to do slick ad campaigns. (Although some companies were, Apple used Chiat \ Day for the famous 1984 Macintosh Superbowl commerical.)

--
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

There's a bright side by smchris · 2007-09-12 04:54 · Score: 1

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.

Well worth watching ! by Anonymous Coward · 2007-09-12 04:57 · Score: 1, Funny

From the metadata :

"Boring until the 7 minute mark when the production is taken over by crack-smoking monkeys"

And don't forget... by Spy+der+Mann · 2007-09-12 04:58 · Score: 2

the LOADHIGH and DEVICEHIGH options in config.sys. They were like a dream come true.

Hey mods, this is NOT Offtopic! by RoverDaddy · 2007-09-12 04:59 · Score: 1

Did you even -watch- the video? Excuse me while I finish cauterizing my optic nerves...

--
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050

you have no clue by everphilski · 2007-09-12 04:59 · Score: 1

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.

Dude in the tie... by Wiseazz · 2007-09-12 05:00 · Score: 2, Funny

Why is Bob Saget in DOS training?

RTFM, Bob.

--
My sig sucks.

Re:News? by Jeff+DeMaagd · 2007-09-12 05:01 · Score: 2, Insightful

You're right about that, but then, I still don't see why people shouldn't be allowed to say that the story is lame.

Re:News? by dintech · 2007-09-12 05:13 · Score: 4, Funny

I do not own my mom, but she is still my mom.

Your loss is my gain dude!

Please! by alexandre · 2007-09-12 05:18 · Score: 4, Funny

Kill me! Now! ahhhh! my eyes!

moo by slothman32 · 2007-09-12 05:19 · Score: 1

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?

Ideal Video to show a First Date by Aqua04 · 2007-09-12 05:30 · Score: 1

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 !!!

Re:Ideal Video to show a First Date by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · 2007-09-12 05:47 · Score: 1

yes, yes. Good idea. However, I remain confused as to show her this video or the incomparable masterpiece " Cool as Ice" staring Vanilla Ice. It has motorcycles, and white guys dancing in parachute pants.

--
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Re:Ideal Video to show a First Date by Aqua04 · 2007-09-12 06:18 · Score: 1

Good point. Whatever you do, just be sure to be in a sitting position in front of the computer and to be rocking your whole upper body back and forth towards the monitor (BillG style) as you show her. This will let her know that you have rhythm.

wait a minute by commodoresloat · 2007-09-12 05:31 · Score: 1

the little animation of the hammer smashing the computer Are we talking about the 1984 Apple ad now?

Re:wait a minute by Nero+Nimbus · 2007-09-12 11:45 · Score: 1

Toward the end of the video, when the guy is trying to rap about the beta test, look at the background. There's an animation of a hammer smashing a computer.

Re:News? by catbutt · 2007-09-12 05:44 · Score: 4, Funny

Yes, they should, but they should also be able to say that the complaining comment was lame. However, I draw the line at complaining about a complaining comment. That's just taking the whole free speach thing too far.

Re:News? by demonbug · 2007-09-12 05:56 · Score: 4, Insightful

Since comments are a valuable part of the site, no, this is not "his", or "their" site now. It's ours.

So that's why there are so many pointless and inane comments on here... it's not that people are boring and uninteresting, it's just that they're trying to raise their ownership stake in the site by increasing their percent share through posting whatever pops into their head!

Not Kidding... by ttapper04 · 2007-09-12 06:04 · Score: 1

At the very end it says:

Windows/386
The soul of the new machines.

Not kidding.

Re:News? by SEE · 2007-09-12 06:04 · Score: 4, Funny

How is this news? /. does not equal Digg. Dear Mr. 7-digit UID:

New around here, aren't you?

Re:News? by nege · 2007-09-12 06:10 · Score: 1

There's already quite enough of that on the internets thankyouverymuch!!! >

This Reminds me of TapeHeads by Anonymous Coward · 2007-09-12 06:11 · Score: 1, Informative

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/).

To cleanse my visual palette... by jpellino · 2007-09-12 06:24 · Score: 1

... I had to go watch Ballmer dance.
>

--
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."

Those were the days (more) by Ollabelle · 2007-09-12 06:38 · Score: 1

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.

I feel like I just drank battery acid. by MichailS · 2007-09-12 06:53 · Score: 1

What I said.

"Stick a fork in your eyes?" Not quite... by r_jensen11 · 2007-09-12 07:06 · Score: 1

...I'd say it's more like making me want to throw a chair or two.

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....

And so it begins... by Torodung · 2007-09-12 07:08 · Score: 1

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

Re:News? by shelterpaw · 2007-09-12 07:34 · Score: 1

and the misses is CmdrTunaTaco?!?!

OMG! DOS 5 was released? by OrangeTide · 2007-09-12 07:45 · Score: 1

wait that's not news.

I wish I could digg down CmdrTaco.

--
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire

Hilarious! by mce · 2007-09-12 07:46 · Score: 1

Quoting from part 2: "Now let me show you what multi-tasking is." On Win95. ROTFLMAO!!!!! :-)

--
Linux user since early January 1992.

Re:Hilarious! by antdude · 2007-09-12 07:52 · Score: 1

I thought it was funny about this being Bill Gates' office. :)

--
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).

Oh my freakin' GOD!!! (OMFG) by Enrique1218 · 2007-09-12 07:53 · Score: 1

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

Re:News? by ChetOS.net · 2007-09-12 07:57 · Score: 1

That is funny, I did the exact same thing.

--
"If God had intended us to walk he would not have invented roller skates." -- Willy Wonka

Re:News? by Reapman · 2007-09-12 08:04 · Score: 1

Ahh the memories you made me remember... before I knew what I was doing (some may say I still don't) with computers, I used Doublespace (NOT the improved, yet still horrific, DriveSpace in 6.22) so that our... 250 meg? hard drive would have 500 megs! It was great... until some software stopped working, took longer to do stuff, and made the mistake of rebooting it while defragmenting the partition.

Chkdsk ran for a good 6 hours that night, and did'nt help much :/

Young, stupid, and enough knowledge to royally f* something up. Miss those days.

Re:Are there any good MS promo videos? by empaler · 2007-09-12 08:10 · Score: 1

Windows 1.0, according to the title. Though, I'm not so sure it's 1.0 - anyone to back me it's 2.0?

Re:Hey, give it some respect by demonbug · 2007-09-12 08:14 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

60 million users waiting to upgrade by curiuz · 2007-09-12 08:35 · Score: 1

Daddy, where were you when MS took over the world?

Re:News? by NatureBoy · 2007-09-12 08:40 · Score: 2

LOL

Re:News? by Anonymous Coward · 2007-09-12 08:42 · Score: 1, Insightful

I for one think kdawson cracked CmdrTaco's password.

Dave Coulier? by otis+wildflower · 2007-09-12 08:48 · Score: 1

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...

Now my mission is clear... by Trails · 2007-09-12 09:01 · Score: 1

CmdrTaco must die.

Definitely by complexmath · 2007-09-12 09:08 · Score: 1

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.

Re:News? by Ash+Vince · 2007-09-12 09:11 · Score: 2, Funny

Your both just pair of old jaded slashdot wrinklies.

Do you sit around in virtual rocking chairs of virtual porches slagging off these damn kids?

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I dont read /. to RTFA, I read /. to offend people in ignorance.

Re:News? by operagost · 2007-09-12 09:14 · Score: 1

Dude, it's MS-DOS 5! Clearly, that's "Stuff that matters!"

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Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.

No need to buy it by stud9920 · 2007-09-12 09:26 · Score: 2, Funny

I'll just Copy that floppy

"It's like selling fries with every burger" by Trogre · 2007-09-12 09:41 · Score: 1

Ain't that the truth.

"No PC should be without it". Heh.

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"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife

When's the last time by saxoholic · 2007-09-12 09:44 · Score: 1

When's the last time upgrading an M$ Product to a new version actually saved memory?

Fork? by Bilbo · 2007-09-12 10:12 · Score: 1

Um... OK, so now how do I get this fork OUT of my eye again?

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.

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Your Servant, B. Baggins

Re:News? by jra · 2007-09-12 10:27 · Score: 1

Yes... yes, he is. :-)

Re:News? by Lord+Duran · 2007-09-12 10:58 · Score: 1

Free speech. (Get it?)

Re:News? by GPL+Apostate · 2007-09-12 11:06 · Score: 1

The thing is, I despised Stak Electronics and especially despised having to help people who allowed their software to screw up their systems.

It isn't enough reason to say it was okay for Microsoft to steal their I.P. but it is enough to say 'meh, who cares' that they failed as a company.

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Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.

Re:News? by GPL+Apostate · 2007-09-12 11:10 · Score: 1

I have had four, five, six and seven digit Slashdot IDs. If you don't get disgusted and throw away an account once in awhile, it just shows you have bad taste.

I have never abandoned an account that didn't have it's +1 posting ability.

Do you remember old days?

Who cares.

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Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.

Re:News?.... Minor correction by flynns · 2007-09-12 11:11 · Score: 1

Negative, sir.

DoubleSpace came with DOS 6, and then DriveSpace replaced it in MS-DOS 6.22. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleSpace

You're welcome. :D

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'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'

don't copy that floppy by garlicbready · 2007-09-12 11:12 · Score: 1

If you want a funky beat, remember kids, just don't copy that floppy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xfqkdh5Js4

Re:News? by The+Great+Pretender · 2007-09-12 11:23 · Score: 1

I wonder if 'Dick On' works the same way 'Flame On' works? He was modded Flamebait afterall...

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A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

Re:News? by bit01 · 2007-09-12 11:38 · Score: 1

Maybe he's an astroturfer who's annoyed because his propaganda piece, sorry "news release", got bounced for this.

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Copyright is a privilege, not a right.

DOS FIVE....!? by aqk · 2007-09-12 16:02 · Score: 1

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.

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- aqk
F U /. illiterates.

Mod Parent Up by martin_henry · 2007-09-12 16:06 · Score: 1

Very good call.

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www.purevolume.com/martyd

Video Toaster used in video! Amiga! by BigBlockMopar · 2007-09-12 16:25 · Score: 1

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.

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Fire and Meat. Yummy.

Re:News? by Sasha-Whitefur · 2007-09-12 16:31 · Score: 1

DOS 5 was as bad a OS as WINME. The GUI, was called dosshell, more commonly known as Dos Hell. One they did right was QBasic, it was as easy to use as C.

Re:News? by scoot80 · 2007-09-12 17:41 · Score: 1

May not be news, but certainly funny. And thats a long video. Was this ever broadcast?

Vista comes with C# and VB.NET, right? by Nurgled · 2007-09-12 19:16 · Score: 1

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.

Re:News?.... Minor correction by Ilgaz · 2007-09-13 03:55 · Score: 1

"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.

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