MS-DOS Is 30 Years Old Today

An anonymous reader writes "Thirty years ago, on July 27 1981, Microsoft bought the rights for QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for $25,000. QDOS, otherwise known as 86-DOS, was designed by SCP to run on the Intel 8086 processor, and was originally thrown together in just two months for a 0.1 release in 1980 (thus the name). Meanwhile, IBM had planned on powering its first Personal Computer with CP/M-86, which had been the standard OS for Intel 8086 and 8080 architectures at the time, but a deal could not be struck with CP/M's developer, Digital Research. IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few of years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools — and as you can probably tell from the landscape of the computer world today, the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed."

Comments

"the partnership worked out rather well"

[John Hasler]

For Microsoft.

Re:"the partnership worked out rather well"

[YodasEvilTwin]

It worked well for IBM, too, at the time. They have also successfully transformed their business model into something quite different, and are still quietly profitable. Sounds like a win to me.

Re:"the partnership worked out rather well"

[im_thatoneguy]

MSFT Market Cap: 229.75B
IBM Market Cap: 215.70B

Seemed to work out pretty well for both of them.

Re:"the partnership worked out rather well"

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

MSFT Market Cap: 229.75B
IBM Market Cap: 215.70B

Seemed to work out pretty well for both of them.

IBM was a business leader well before DOS. Hell, they put together the hardware for simultaneous translation at the Nuremberg Trials. (Disclaimer: I saw it in a movie.) Microsoft's growth is in a much shorter period of time.

wow

[Osgeld]

what a half assed summary, and it was not the IBM/Microsoft partnership that did shit, its the MS licencing agreement that allowed MS to sell to other people than IBM that made a huge fucking difference when the clones came in and obliterated IBM at their own game

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

"obliterated"?

IBM turned 100 years old and is worth 182 bn as I write this. MSFT is at 231 bn.

So "obliterated" is a bit of a strong word...

Now the whole clone thing is very interesting: there aren't that many "real" Apple clones of the iPod / iPad / Macs / iPhone family and AAPL is now weighting 402 bn, nearly as much as IBM + MSFT.

As long as AAPL doesn't make the same mistake IBM did, I'm happy ; )

Re:wow

[Alien Being]

You're right about the clones and the resulting rise of MS. OTOH, the original IBM PC did do one important thing. It legitimized personal microcomputers in big business. Many large corporations would not allow Apple ][ no matter how badly finance people wanted Visicalc. The IBM name was what made it happen.

Re:wow

[Osgeld]

IBM's worth is from much more than PC sales, they kind of do other things, does IBM even make PC's anymore? I know levno or whatever but thats a totally different company now isnt it?

Re:wow

[PRMan]

It's not Microsoft's fault that IBM put out the worst PCs at the highest prices...

Re:wow

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

It's not Microsoft's fault that IBM put out the worst PCs at the highest prices...

Some of them were pretty nice. You could tell cause they were heavier.

(But they did cost more.)

Re:wow

[mal141]

Ah yes the clone wars, just before the empire took over complete domination.

Re:wow

[Jonner]

what a half assed summary, and it was not the IBM/Microsoft partnership that did shit, its the MS licencing agreement that allowed MS to sell to other people than IBM that made a huge fucking difference when the clones came in and obliterated IBM at their own game

Don't forget the IBM/Microsoft partnership on OS/2. At some point MS decided they'd do better on their own an started developing NT OS/2 which is the basis of Windows NT, XP, and all current versions of Windows.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

get off my lawn

Still in use

[betterunixthanunix]

DOS is still being used in some places...

Re:Still in use

[Phreakiture]

Yep, and it still sucks.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned in my youth is that marketing beats quality or usability. I remember in 1993 or so, buying a Zip drive to hook up to my Amiga and telling one of my friends about it. His reaction (as a DOS/Windows 3 user) was "where did you get a driver from?" He was gobsmacked to find out that I didn't need one.

Okay, so I'm an old fart, but I'm not going to wax poetic over DOS. I never liked it, because somehow, I saw through the marketing and understood that spending $500ish on a machine that had colour video, decent stereo audio (the likes of which has only in the last five or six years started to seem dated), an OS that can be run by GUI or CLI kludge-free, a superior processor, etc was a better deal than spending four times that for a machine that couldn't get out of its own way to repaint monochrome text on a block-mapped screen, and couldn't make better than little "bleep bloop" type sounds.

Yet, the less capable, far more expensive machine won. It was very disappointing to me.

Re:Still in use

[Anonymous Coward]

Still being developed....

Just search for FreeDOS and then shake your head in disgust.....

Re:Still in use

[XxtraLarGe]

I teach a 1 credit DOS class at my local community college, and have had a number of students tell me the batch file stuff they learn has been useful in their jobs.

Re:Still in use

[idontgno]

I'm an Amiga bigot from waaaay back, too. (My first computer as an adult was an Amiga 1000, or just an Amiga when it was originally sold.).

But as a former frontline flamewarrior, I have to say: It's time to come out of the jungle. We lost that war. Yes, our chosen computer was vastly superior in every way. The difference was that Commodore couldn't sell T-bone steak and potato chips to starving people. Commmodore-brand sushi would be marketed under the tagline "The best cold, dead raw fish you've ever had!".

Superior marketing always wins. That's the lesson here, Amiga Persecution Complex notwithstanding.

Re:Still in use

[Phreakiture]

Oh, yeah, I agree with you 100%. I'm currently a hard-core Linux lover, though I have got to say that I miss the days of being able to write scripts that could prompt for a needed resource just by referring to the resource. That was a wicked nice touch in the OS. On the other hand, I don't miss the incessant click-click-click of the floppy drive, and I would say that in the last decade, PC technology caught up with where the Amiga was in the early 90's, and has since surpassed it.

Note, though, getting back on the main point, that DOS is rarely a part of that. Taking the DOS out of Windows was one of Microsoft's smarter moves. Avoiding Microsoft altogether, however, is preferred.

Re:Still in use

[iggymanz]

FreeDOS has an awesome use. BIOS updates often run only under windows or under DOS, and that can be a problem for a GNU/Linux or BSD box. Two days ago I updated my BIOS by putting the .EXE on a FreeDOS CD-R.

Re:Still in use

[statsone]

yes, I use it for a cnc machine to run turbocnc. Windows would actually be more of a problem in sending singles to the control units Will use freedos next.

Re:Still in use

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use DOS almost every day. The lab I work in has a ton of old equipment controlled by DOS programs - stuff that was custom made, and would be many thousands of dollars to replace. Aside from having to hunt down still-functioning floppy disks to transfer data, the system works great!

I bet there are a lot of old, special-purpose setups that still run DOS out there, simply because replacing them would mean having to replace other expensive equipment.

Re:Still in use

[Yunzil]

The difference was that Commodore couldn't sell T-bone steak and potato chips to starving people.

The difference is Commodore spent their marketing budget (and R&D budget) paying their CEO a stupid salary.

Re:Still in use

[Jim Hall]

Still being developed.... Just search for FreeDOS and then shake your head in disgust.....

Sorry that you aren't as enthusiastic about it as we are.

Yes, we're still working on FreeDOS. In fact, if you visit our web site you'll see that we are currently working on the FreeDOS 1.1 distribution. We're almost there! After that is out, we'll start the discussion for what FreeDOS "2.0" should be, what a modern DOS should look like in 2011.

So yes, we are still doing some work there.

Re:Still in use

[Bing Tsher E]

The problem with the Amiga was that it wasn't really a single-processor machine. It had the 68xxx processor, but the rest of it was a big cluster of custom silicon, that bunch of chips with girl's names. That doesn't scale well in the world of the period of the demise of the Amiga, when megahertz kept stepping up incrementally. When a 233 MHz processor came out from Intel, Commodore couldn't roll out Ruth, Wanda, and Stella chips with a corresponding speed increase. (I am certain these aren't the girlish names for the chips, I wasn't enough of an Amiga fan to remember the real names.)

The Amiga was special-purpose with much more special-purpose silicon than anybody could clone. And lord help us if something with specialized chips like that HAD become the dominant platform. We'd all be stuck on some single-sourced monopoly platform. Warren Buffet or some other greedy fuck would have bought Commodore and we'd be dancing his tune.

Re:Still in use

[idontgno]

You'd better be calling The Good Lord for help right now, because while you weren't looking specialized chips like that DID become the dominant platform, and GPGPU is going to make it more so. The primary processor (which is also from a duopoloy) will just become a system management hypervisor.

Read up on the technological cycle of reincarnation. "All this has happened before. All this will happen again."

Re:Still in use

[X3J11]

... what a modern DOS should look like in 2011.

A corpse?

I kid. I appreciate the work all those involved in the FreeDOS project put in to it.

Re:Still in use

[Rockoon]

Yes, our chosen computer was vastly superior in every way.

The facts are different.

Commodore's problem was that Amiga wasn't #1 at anything. Its audio was trumped by machines such as the Apple IIgs (16 channel wavetable) and the Atari ST (best MIDI software and capabilities.) Its graphics were again trumped by machines like the Apple IIgs (4096 simultaneous colors.) Its blitter chip doesnt win anything in a world where consoles dominate gaming. The nintendo had better animation capabilities than the Amiga, and they both came out the same year (1985.)

I'm getting tired of hearing the Amiga fanboys keep repeating the same fiction that was wrong from the start. It wasnt vastly superior in every way to alternatives in the market. Its problem was that it wasnt best at anything. There was nothing you could point to and say "the Amiga was better than this than everyone else" .. its just not true.

The Amiga was probably the best "all around" package, being #2 or #3 in most areas.. but it wasn't #1 at anything specifically.

Re:Still in use

[Bing Tsher E]

Really? You mean all the new OSes run on widely varied platforms? And Apple didn't actually give up and switch over to x86?

We don't pray to the same gods, I guess.

Re:Still in use

[Darinbob]

I teach a course in using buggy whips and I have had several managers tell me that these have come in useful in their jobs.

Re:Still in use

[DarthVain]

Tragically I had to edit batch files just months ago, to fix a cobbled together Frankenstein of a solution... the horror. Problem is managers faced with "it costs X and will take Y to do this properly", or "I can rig something together with small pieces of twine, batch files, and the last pieces of my soul", they usually pick the soul option.

I know I personally learned batch files trying to make crappy games play on my 286 when I was a teen. XMS was just wonderful stuff.

Re:Still in use

[PRMan]

It's expandability that won in the businesses and compatibility with the business that caused it to win at home. Amiga never had legitimate business apps in 90% of verticals.

Re:Still in use

[shutdown -p now]

In truth, most of those people who need to write a batch script today, will likely do so for XP or higher. Which has many more features in the batch language that weren't there in DOS. So many ugly hacks you had to do back in the day are not needed anymore.

(I vividly remember one "trick" where a batch file needed to let the user select one of the several options; this was before DOS 6, so no "choice" command. What they did was make a subdirectory alongside the main batch file, with files like 1.bat, 2.bat etc in it. The main batch file would change shell prompt to "blah blah blah make a choice (1-9):", cd to that subdirectory, and exit. User would then type a number, press Enter, and this would launch the appropriate numbered batch file that'd perform the required action. Ugh!)

Re:Still in use

[Anonymous Coward]

I teach a 1 credit DOS class at my local community college, and have had a number of students tell me the batch file stuff they learn has been useful in their jobs.

Yeah, batch files are still a great way to do a variety of simple tasks in Windows. It sucks that no built in scripting language has come around to replace it.

And yes, I am very aware of PowerShell, WMI, WSH scripting, etc. But the problem is that none of that is as easy to learn and master as simple batch files are.

Re:Still in use

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you ever think it might have had something to do with the fact that the PC, was with the loan exception of the CPU itself a fairly strait forward and orthagonally consistent platform. Where almost everything was done in software on that CPU, so that and the odd memory hole were the two things you needed to know.

Your Amiga on the other hand was a mess of support chips and controllers each with their own behaviors and requirements. Suppose you wanted to substantially raise the bus clock rate in the next get Amiga how was that 1541 controler going to deal? Which platform do you think was going to be able to scale? It would have been really hard to take the Amiga anywhere near as far as we have gone with the PC and maintain any sort of binary software compatibility.

I can install MSDOS on a brand new machine now and it will work, won't see all the memory but it will work.

Re:Still in use

[owlstead]

Batch files are horrible but they are better than nothing. Once you know bash or *any* other shell language, you come to realize how shitty DOS or the standard Windows CMD really is. First thing to do on a development system: install cygwin, and use bash instead of cmd. It's not as compatible with windows as cmd is (because of the pathnames mostly) but OMG, what a difference in usage. And cygwin is packing the "fortune" command - which helps me through yet another day.

For teaching a shell like language, I would go for perl, as it is easy to configure on both systems, packs a huge library and lays the base of PHP as well. Even if DOS is only DOS, it will give students an idea of what a language is, how easy it is to make mistakes, and how you can automate and document repetative tasks. So well done there.

Re:Still in use

[Hatta]

First thing to do on a development system: install cygwin

Cygwin is a must on any Windows system. Almost any task you do on a computer involves file management, and Bash is much better at file management than anything graphical.

Re:Still in use

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank god someone still teaches this to new techs.

Re:Still in use

[Anonymous Coward]

That is scary. Given there are better options, people must be using it since it's installed by default. I'm so glad Linux and Mac OS X have more useful languages available by default. Even Bourne shell would be preferable to DOS.

Re:Still in use

[lennier]

I teach a course in using buggy whips and I have had several managers tell me that these have come in useful in their jobs.

Look, just get those whips debugged already! Could accidentally put someone's eye out who did meet their productivity quota.

Re:Still in use

[camperdave]

For a while there, I kept my .bat files in c:\belfry.

Re:Still in use

[lennier]

Agreed that cmd.exe is nasty. A better idea on Windows is to learn PowerShell. You can do everything in it that you can do in cmd, but it's a proper dynamic scripting language with some very interesting features (integrated pervasive pipelining, yum). A couple of weird tics, like auto-flattening of arrays when you least expect it, but on the whole it's a huge step forward in systems integration languages.

Re:Still in use

[BeaverCleaver]

I dunno, the Amiga had its HAM graphics modes which could do 4096 simultaneous colours. The fact that the graphics output had the same refresh rate as TV was pretty awesome too, and sold quite a few Amigas to TV studios.

NES had superior animation? Maybe there is some spec buried in the NES datasheets that's superior. In the real world however, I propose that th only way the Amiga could fail against a NES is if it wasn't switched on ;-)

Tha Atari had better music _software_ but MIDI itself is pretty much just serial with a different pinout (so that musicians were forced to buy overpriced cables) but even the Amiga's serial port could handle the 19200bps that was MIDI.

And one area where the Amiga was definitely #1 was the OS. Unfortunately this was before the operating system was seen as anything important, so the consumers (and Commodore's own retarded marketing department) didn't appreciate how awesome it really was. Diferent screen resolutions displaying _at the same time_, true multitasking, in 256k of memory... I could go on, but it's a long time ago, and I have some kids I need to chase off my lawn.

Plenty of good videos on YouTube though. The BBC's "Compute" program was pretty damn impressed in the 1980s. Windowed GUIs were so novel at the time (Xerox and Apple's work notwithstanding) that the presenters didn't even have the words to describe what they were doing.... "Now we drag this little box over here..."

Re:Still in use

[Anonymous Coward]

Commodore had a huge hit with the Commodore 64, but they screwed all their dealers (distribution) by putting it in K-mart for $100. Then when they came out with a serious computer that required computer dealers to sell and support they had nothing. They went for the big mass market quick success and screwed their future.

Re:Still in use

[mjwx]

DOS is still being used in some places...

Except now it's got a bad comb over, picked up a young ditzy girlfriend and drives a mid range sports car.

Welcome to mid life DOS.

Re:Still in use

[DocHoncho]

Real men use VBScript!! .... *shudder*

Re:Still in use

[Paul1969]

Somebody mod this up, please!
I missed out on Commodore and Amiga myself, but I have friends who were users and still rhapsodize over its advanced capabilities. And they are seriously knowledgeable and capable ubergeeks.

Re:Still in use

[XxtraLarGe]

That is scary. Given there are better options, people must be using it since it's installed by default. I'm so glad Linux and Mac OS X have more useful languages available by default. Even Bourne shell would be preferable to DOS.

I also teach a 1 credit Unix class on the Macs we have on campus. However, we have a lot of machine, tool & dye shops in my area that run legacy systems, that figure if it ain't broke, don't fix it, so basic DOS stuff is useful for anyone looking for an IT job in the area.

Re:Still in use

[tehcyder]

Unless my memory fails me, Amigas were not a quarter of the price of a PC.

I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[thomasdz]

I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0... They added subdirectories (folders)! what a concept.

I still occasionally boot up machines with MSDOS v6.22 ... in order to run my copy of WordPerfect v5.1 :-)

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[EraserMouseMan]

Yes v6.2 rocked! You could run in compressed mode and double your HD space!

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Pope]

And in 2011 everyone who comes over to OS X from Windows bitches about folders/directories not sorting to the top, all because DOS did it and that got carried over.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[idontgno]

Yes v6.2 rocked! You could run in compressed mode and double your likelihood of catastrophic data loss!

FTFY. Doublespace was playing craps every second of every day of your life and hoping you don't ever crap out.

Hard disks were expensive, but I learned early on: delete your own unneeded data, or let Doublespace delete everything.... your choice.

And talking about Doublespace/Drivespace... brings up (A) one of the earliest examples of Microsoft playing dirty pool with prospective partners, and (B)(to my recollection) one of the earliest examples of a successful software patent lawsuit.

linky

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[stox]

The jump was from PC/DOS 1.1 to 2.0. 1.0 was very short lived.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Chemisor]

And just remember how WordPerfect 5.1 met all your word processing needs in less than 640k, while OpenOffice writer needs 640M to do it.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?? Just fill the landfill with your lead and arsenic filled old hardware and buy an overpriced and overpowered new computer even though the old one still works

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[realityimpaired]

Use AbiWord... it's more in line with the analogy, because like WordPerfect, it's just a word processor and doesn't load spreadsheet libraries just to present you with a text window.

That said, yes, things do use a *lot* more memory these days. They're also prettier, and have significantly more features that were unthinkable when WordPerfect 5.1 came out. WordPerfect is more in line with editing a TeX file directly than it is using a modern WYSIWYG editor.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

You can go much further back for dirty pool from Microsoft. Microsoft stole their first product (Microsoft BASIC) away from MITS (albeit legally, but only barely). In fact, I really only know of one guy that managed to get one over on Microsoft, which would be Jack Tramiel managing to catch Bill Gates at a bad moment and getting a lifetime license to BASIC and the right to release updates for it for Commodore.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[izomiac]

I doubt anyone seriously uses an old DOS machine for daily web browsing anymore. So, no new computers need to be bought. OTOH, the landfill will have that old DOS machine sooner or later. The only practical difference is in storing the machine, and the extra power consumption in running it.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?? Just turn the DOS machine off and save power when you're not using WP5.1

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[CSMoran]

You could do this with STACKER for at least four years before that...

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Bing Tsher E]

You mean that the BASIC interpreter that Microsoft coded and sold to MITS, they stole back from MITS? Or did they just have a more open license, as was kinda typical in that day.

If anybody back then was stealing BASIC, it was the computer clubs. Microsoft found themselves selling one copy of BASIC to each User Group, i.e. one copy to each major metropolitan area.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[danomac]

And talking about Doublespace/Drivespace... brings up (A) one of the earliest examples of Microsoft playing dirty pool with prospective partners, and (B)(to my recollection) one of the earliest examples of a successful software patent lawsuit.

Yes, I used Stac's Stacker software and add-in processing card. It actually worked rather well, and I never had issues with that setup, unlike Doublespace. I remember some friends going "oooh you have 200 MB of disk space?"

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[shutdown -p now]

They added subdirectories (folders)!

IIRC, It was "subdirectories" all the way until Win95. It was certainly never "folders" in DOS.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[shutdown -p now]

Or maybe just because it makes more sense?

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

And just remember how WordPerfect 5.1 met all your word processing needs in less than 640k, while OpenOffice writer needs 640M to do it.

I wonder how much of OpenOffice Writer code is just because of the GUI nature of it. WP didn't care about WYSIWYG, it just edited your text, and you could dump it via whatever printer you had, daisywheel even. If you wanted something fancy, you had to know the control codes for your setup.

The user interface, dealing with fonts, effects, all of that is the complicated pain in the ass code. I wouldn't be surprised if the core of the processor was actually pretty small compared to the front end. Looking, I can't even find a text based word processor for Linux just to make a comparison. Even those are GUI based now.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

The days when 640k was indeed enough for anyone....

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Hatta]

WordPerfect is more in line with editing a TeX file directly than it is using a modern WYSIWYG editor

In other words, Word Perfect is better than a modern WYSIWYG editor.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[DocHoncho]

To this day I find myself waffling back and forth between saying "folders" or "directories"... sometimes in the same sentence. Emacs ruined me worse, I can't count the times I hit C-x C-s to save only to have VS cut the current line and then save. Thank goodness for Undo! And don't even get me started on the Emacs movement commands... C-Left/C-Right just is too much hand movement.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[shutdown -p now]

Emacs ruined me worse, I can't count the times I hit C-x C-s to save only to have VS cut the current line and then save.

Visual Studio, up to and including VS2008, had Emacs keybinding scheme selectable out of the box, which should help there (in particular, it rebinds C-x C-s to save, among other things). For VS2010, this is available as an separate extension, which tries to be even closer to how Emacs behaves.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[DocHoncho]

I knew VS 2008 had it. After I installed VS 2010 I noticed the distinct lack of Emacs bindings, but fortunately I don't have to use VS all that often. I did set Aptana nee Eclipse up to use Emacs bindings, although they're sorely lacking. I'd still be using emacs except my project just got too big (and with Django the file structure can be both wide and deep). RE: VS, I like Visual Studio, I hate MS technologies. Everything is so... goddamned stupid.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I'm not the only one to use WP5.1. You've made my day:)

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[tehcyder]

WordPerfect is more in line with editing a TeX file directly than it is using a modern WYSIWYG editor

In other words, Word Perfect is better than a modern WYSIWYG editor.

Yes, if your aim is to produce look-a-like academic physics papers from the 1950s, then TeX is the tool for the job. Meanwhile, for knocking out a quick letter, I know which I prefer.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Hatta]

LaTeX is ideal for knocking out a quick letter. It has a letter class that does everything you need and looks great. The margins need a little tweaking, but you only have to do that once.

Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Abiword. It's still not a svelte 640k but it's usable in under like 32 megs of ram, which means you could even in theory run it on an old Pentium box with win9x (assuming it's still supporting the original win32 interfaces.) While it may not be business class by today's standards I wrote all my reports for 3 semesters straight in it for english classes in community college :)

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[operagost]

They're so old, their Slashdot IDs are negative.

United Way

[Moby Cock]

IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few of years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools

I think that IBM was 'approached' by MS. Gates' mother had contacts through her role as a high ranking official in the United Way. That got Bill a foot in the door and he made good on the opportunity. Major successes are often a convergence of skill, ambition and blind luck, and the MS fortune is, I think, one of those cases.

Re:United Way

[Anonymous Coward]

Major successes are often a convergence of skill, ambition and blind luck

Well, two out of three ain't bad...

Re:United Way

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily. Microsoft were already supplying the interpreter (BASIC) and were quite big at the time at supplying interpreters (for, e.g., Altair, Apple II, Commodore PET, and many others).

Re:United Way

[steelfood]

Major successes are often a convergence of skill, ambition and blind luck

And a woman to open doors. I know this is Slashdot, but there's a reason behind every successful man is a woman. True to geekdom, for Bill Gates, it was his mother.

Re:United Way

[dintech]

Whatever you say Oedipus.

Re:United Way

[Attila Dimedici]

IBM was already doing business with MS for programming languages. When they could not cut a deal with Gary Kildall for CP/M on the IBM PC, they went to MS and asked them for suggestions. At that point, Bill Gates had heard about QDOS and told IBM that MS could provide them with an OS.
The reason that IBM was willing to trust this kid was because his Mom worked with the CEO of IBM on the United Way board. Of course the other reason IBM was willing to work with MS was because they were in the middle of a big anti-trust fight with the Justice Department.

Re:United Way

[Anonymous Coward]

Major successes are often a convergence of skill, ambition and blind luck

Like making very large amounts of money with failed oil businesses (yes, plural) because your daddy is a high ranking politician with close ties to the rich and not-so-famous. Who knows, those family connections could even make you president of the United States.

Re:United Way

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention ruthlessness. Here you had THE main computer company. It fell to the new software company, which did a simple job of programming, which it largely stole from paper and punch cards from DEC dumpsters, but that doesn't meet the Microsoft version of how smart programmers they were. People who worked at IBM at the time could have written a minicomputer OS, but for whatever internal political reasons, were not asked to.

Re:United Way

[Rockoon]

Microsoft was already well established in the market by that point. It was hard to find a machine that did not have a Microsoft BASIC baked into a ROM chip, and even harder to find one that didn't rely on any Microsoft BASIC at all. Everyone used Microsoft.

IBM was doing business with an already established partner when they contracted Microsoft for an OS.

Re:United Way

[elashish14]

Major successes are often...

That word... I do not think it means what you think it means

Re:United Way

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the other reason IBM was willing to work with MS was because they were in the middle of a big anti-trust fight with the Justice Department.

And there is Mr. Blind Luck again :)

Re:United Way

[tehcyder]

IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few of years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools

I think that IBM was 'approached' by MS. Gates' mother had contacts through her role as a high ranking official in the United Way. That got Bill a foot in the door and he made good on the opportunity. Major successes are often a convergence of skill, ambition and blind luck, and the MS fortune is, I think, one of those cases.

Until you abolish the concepts of inherited wealth and privelege, some people are always going to have an advantage in life. At least Bill Gates didn't just get parachuted into a cushy investment banking job because of his background.

Microsoft Dirty Operating System

[Kell Bengal]

The MS-DOS acronym It always made me wonder. If QDOS was Quick and Dirty Operating System, then surely MS-DOS is Microsoft Dirty Operating System. It's a weird way to brand your product.

Re:Microsoft Dirty Operating System

[YodasEvilTwin]

They backronym'd it to Disk Operating System.

Re:Microsoft Dirty Operating System

[TheRaven64]

I was told it was Messy, Dirty, Operating System.

Re:Microsoft Dirty Operating System

[SirGarlon]

Well the key thing is that they made it not "quick."

Re:Microsoft Dirty Operating System

[sharkey]

And backdoored much of the world!

Re:Microsoft Dirty Operating System

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they didn't. There were already Disk Operating Systems before MS-DOS. TRS-DOS and LDOS come to mind, but some of the big systems used the acronym as well iirc.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue a gazillion posts by depressed old farts noticing that they are, in fact, old farts.

Get off my lawn!

I'm gonna...

[trum4n]

play some crappy old games on my Tandy tonight. It has outlived 14 PC's i have bought since. Good old TLX1000 with a hard drive and single 3.5" floopy drive.

Re:I'm gonna...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a Tandy 1000HX with a single 720K floppy - it was so cool to have DOS 2.11 boot from ROM instead of having to insert a floppy to boot all the time; well, at least until DOS 3 came out..

Re:I'm gonna...

[trum4n]

My TLX has a hard drive. I loved booting it up with out disks too. The twist is, i am 23. This computer was old when i got it! I still love it, and wonder why youtube is so badly written that it hangs on my quad core, when everything i really ever would need ran on my 9.56mhz Tandy.

Re:I'm gonna...

[omnichad]

The 1000HX was my first computer - in 1995. It was FAST!!!! And you really couldn't beat the graphics or sound.

Re:I'm gonna...

[omnichad]

The DOS on ROM was fast. That is all that was...

Re:I'm gonna...

[DaVince21]

But can you play Commander Keen on it?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue a gazillion trolls posting clueless, bravado comments....

Wax nostalgic

[Anonymous Coward]

DOS! Int 21! Oh how I miss those days!

Graphics! Bypass the fucker and hit the graphics card directly.

And the extenders.....

Those were the days. Needed to figure out code? All you needed were some Highlighters, pencil paper and a few hours and you were done.

Now you spend hours and days to figure out that the class you were hunting down was nothing more than a constant - why the programmer couldn't use a fucking "typedef" instead - Oh I know! It wasn't "Object Oriented" and his professor at school told him that it was "incorrect" because it violated the natural physical laws of computer science that he pulled out of his ass.

CS Professors who teach their preferences as "law" or "scientific fact" should be executed by being forced to write an operating system Apple Basic on a Windows 7 hand held device.

Remember kids, what your CS professor taught you as the "right" way was nothing more than his or hers preferences and he forced them on you because he could.

True story: In a CS class, there was an MSEE in there because the dumb fucking administration forced him and me to take the C++ class because it was "required" as a prereq for a grad class - it didn't matter that this guy (and me) learned on his own and was an embedded programmer with years of C++ experience.

Anyway, the CS Prof. told the class the "right" way to do something - doesn't matter what it was. The MSEE pointed out why that isn't necessarily correct. Prof argued that it was. Long story short: MSEE spanked CS prof hard - metaphorically of course - about why and how the prof was wrong.

CS Prof: "This is my class and we'll do it this way because it's the way I wanted it."

Those that can do; those that can't teach.

Re:Wax nostalgic

[adonoman]

While I agree with most of your post, if you spend hours and days trying to hunt down a class definition, then you're doing it wrong. Any IDE will let you jump to the declaration and/or definition of an identifier, and failing that, there's grep.

Re:Wax nostalgic

[hedwards]

Those that can do; those that can't teach.

You get that in any field where the pay is poor for the hours worked. Teachers end up getting singled out because everybody thinks they know how to teach when in reality it's another set of skills that you're being expected to master on top of the ones that are required to have knowledge of the field. And trust me, it isn't easy to get somebody that has years of experience in a particular specialty, knowledge of the necessary pedagogy and is still willing to work for peanuts with little to no job security early on.

Teaching isn't about being correct in every instance, if teachers did that you're mind would be mush before you got to the second class. You can't learn all the information in a single class that's necessary to understand the class without taking a lot of short cuts and telling a lot of white lies. Which is one of the reasons why folks in industry tend to suck so much at teaching. You have to take shortcuts otherwise the students will never learn enough to get to the next class.

Re:Wax nostalgic

[AdamHaun]

Computing is a lot better now than it was back then, but there are a few things I miss. Knowing what every file and directory was used for. Being able to "uninstall" programs just by deleting their directory, with no config files or registry entries or forgotten documentation left lying around. Having total control over the (fast) system startup, which was finished the moment the command prompt appeared -- no waiting five minutes for everything to finish loading. That cleanness and simplicity is something that no modern operating system has been able to reproduce.

Not that I'm in any hurry to go back, mind you...

Re:Wax nostalgic

[berniemne]

You still need this if you're a developer. I still need total control of my development environment. (Midnight commander and Total commaders are your friend for this.)

Re:Wax nostalgic

[tehcyder]

While I agree with most of your post, if you spend hours and days trying to hunt down a class definition, then you're doing it wrong. Any IDE will let you jump to the declaration and/or definition of an identifier, and failing that, there's grep.

Everyone here's too macho to use an IDE, and grep's cheating.

meanwhile, somewhere above Silicon Valley...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gary Kildall was heard to remark, "I'm glad I missed that silly meeting so I'd have time to think. Let's do right by our customers... we'll need a multi-tasking operating system from the get-go with 32-bit CPUs and 3 GB RAM."

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny and true. I guess I won't be posting.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue a gazillion posts by depressed old farts noticing that they are, in fact, old farts.

Hey, I resemble that remark! Now get off my lawn.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue a gazillion posts by depressed old farts noticing that they are, in fact, old farts.

Thanks. Until you pointed it out, I hadn't noticed! Z-DOS anyone?

Worked out well?

[BitZtream]

and as you can probably tell from the landscape of the computer world today, the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed.

Worked out well for who? Microsoft? Okay, true. IBM? Nope. You and I? Nope. Other than a few pockets at MS, who did it work out well for?

Re:Worked out well?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM made a *TON* of money then made several missteps that really set out to rip off their customers and handed the market to the 3rd party OEMs.

You would not be typing your crap on windows/linux if it were not for that partnership...

Re:Worked out well?

[harrkev]

Well, I remember when I was a kid, the computer world was very fragmented. Apple was incompatible with Atari was incompatible with Commodore was incompatible with IBM. Need I mention the other minor players, such as Franklin, Acorn, TI, Sinclair, etc.? Great game came out? Odds are it won't run on the system that YOU have. As much as I generally dislike the major players, at least there are only three major platforms that you have to develop for. In fact, you can develop a game for only one market, and still have the opportunity to make quite a bit of money.

Re:Worked out well?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

In what sense did it work out well? Economically for Microsoft and IBM? Perhaps. For the rest of the world that suffers working under the decrepit POS that is Windows OS?

For the rest of the world there is Linux.

Re:Worked out well?

[Anonymous Coward]

TI was awesome. I had a TI-99/4a for my first, and it still runs great. I dust it off about once a year, play chess and mess with a game that I programmed on it when I was a kid using the TI BASIC manual.

Re:Worked out well?

[Relayman]

It worked out great for anti-virus companies. Where would they be (non-existent) if it weren't for Microsoft?

Re:Worked out well?

[itsdapead]

Well, I remember when I was a kid, the computer world was very fragmented. Apple was incompatible with Atari was incompatible with Commodore was incompatible with IBM.

...but for serious business computing, long before MS-DOS, there was CP/M, which ran on hardware from many different manufacturers. As a kid, you didn't want one (a) because you couldn't afford it and (b) the cheaper, fragmented systems had cool things like sound and colour graphics. It was, however, sufficiently important that you could even buy Z80-based second processors for 6502 systems like the Apple and BBC Micro to run CP/M. By that time, device-independent graphics libraries for CP/M were cropping up (GDI if I remember correctly. I used the Z80/CPM second processor for the BBC Micro for a while, which included GDI - it cropped up later in the GEM windowing system).

Then, as 16/32 bit processors started to appear, Unix could have been a contender, were it not for the DOS dominance. I suppose it was a contender: of the 3 modern platforms you mention one is officially Unix (Mac OS X) one would be Unix if it could afford the club membership (Linux) and one is Posix-compliant on alternate Thursdays (Windows).

The other thing is that, now, we have the luxury of oodles of CPU power, RAM and storage space. This means we can write major apps, games even, in high-level languages and have hardware abstraction layers that bury the technical details of graphics hardware, sound and other peripherals. We can even have virtual machines running with reasonable performance - Apple have been able to switch from 68K to PPC to Intel and completely change OS while still providing backward compatibility. Back in the good old 8-bit days, that sort of thing would have been a pipedream - you needed bare-metal access and assembly code to get a decent performance. "Compatibility" then meant compatible hardware whereas today it is more about compatible APIs. Too much emphasis on compatibility then would have stunted development (Exhibit A: the IBM PC).

Re:Worked out well?

[rock_climbing_guy]

I have rather fond memories of programming on handheld TI-86 "Graphing Calculator". I hate to see that they haven't been producing a new line. Once it got approved by the College Board for use on the SAT, that was about the end of it.

Re:Worked out well?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think worse than it not being available for your platform was having an inferior version. I remember the Commodore 64 version of Sim City was awful. Instead of seeing houses and buildings appear in your zones, you got an outlined rectangle that filled up with black squares that represented population. Yay fun.

Re:Worked out well?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you like the idea of driving other businesses out of business ?

While you may have only noticed games the business users did have a compatible system since the mid 70s: CP/M. Dozens of makers sold CP/M systems and programs such as Supercalc, dBase II, Peachtree, and Wordstar would run on all of them. This included SCP with their Zebra machines and Microsoft who produced their Z80 add on card for the Apple II. In fact MS produced software for CP/M such as COBOL and BASIC compilers.

MS-DOS was a clone of CP/M (some say an actual copy) so that CP/M software could be ported easily.

So your praise should be directed half a decade earlier to DRI.

Re:Worked out well?

[IceNinjaNine]

Were the Acorns and Sinclairs released in the EU exclusively (with the exception of the TS 1000)? Never had much hankerin' for a Sinclair since I had an Atari 800, but later on the Acorn Archimedes looked pretty cool. Worked on a Radio Shack Coco (Dragon for you Euro folks) running OS9 back in the day, and if that wasn't nerd pr0n I don't know what was. Made Spartados on my Atari look lame.

Re:Worked out well?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people like Windows. Your being a disillusioned old man doesn't change the fact that most people who didn't work in the industry in its early days are fine with it. Most people I know like Windows 7, even if I personally won't use it. And plenty of backends use Linux or some other UNIX variant.

Re:Worked out well?

[shutdown -p now]

What OS would you have used instead? Remember that we're talking about 8086 CPU here, so forget 32-bit or usable multitasking.

Re:Worked out well?

[itsdapead]

Were the Acorns and Sinclairs released in the EU exclusively?

You mentioned the Timex/Sinclair computers. some of which were sold elswhere.

As for the US market (I know that other locations outside Europe exist, so apologies if you're from one of those...) There were US versions of the BBC Micro and Archimedes but they were a flop.

One problem was, I suspect, that US computers were always expensive in the UK (reading a copy of Byte was a good way to cause apoplexy here in the UK when you saw that £700 Apple II cost $700 in the USA despite the exchange rate being around 2:1) - so here in the UK the technically more advanced BBC Micro was half the price of the Apple II. Of course, this mysterious £/$ parity only works one way, so by the time that BBC Micro had been exported to the US, its in the same price bracket as the Apple.

Problem 2 is the US's Never The Same Color 525 line apology for a TV system. So, while the UK BBC Micro could do 640x256 graphics on a 625-line PAL TV or monitor, the US NTSC version could only do 640x200. Consequence: lots of software (particularly games) breaks, so the US versions (already getting caned by the vast range of software for the now similarly-priced Apple) can't run lots of UK software.

Problem 3 is that the US FCC had this silly notion that people within 500' of a working computer should still be able to listen to a FM radio (sounds un-American to me, maybe it only applied to imports) whereas (in the happy days before European CE ratings) the likes of Sinclair and Acorn cheerfully stuck their electronics into unshielded plastic boxes. Consequence: all the cases needed re-designing for the US market making the product even more expensive.

Unfortunately, Acorn and Sinclair then decided to try and compete with each other. Pity, because Sinclair was really good at making insanely cheap computers for people who couldn't afford a computer, while Acorn were good at making serious bits of extremely versatile kit for people who could. The results of their competition - the Acorn Electron and the Sinclair QL - were a bit like one of those "In Hell..." jokes and didn't end well.

The BBC have even dramatized the story for television.

but later on the Acorn Archimedes looked pretty cool

So was the little ol' processor that Acorn threw together to run it. I believe you can now buy those outside of Europe ;-).

Re:Worked out well?

[owlstead]

No there isn't because the government is directly or indirectly (e.g. public broadcasters using silverlight for video broadcasts) pushing us to use Windows. Word documents, Signed PDF, the list goes on. It's probably even worse with the private sector where I still get documents from collegues that are one version further along with office, so that I'm missing the last lamest feature to play the powerpoint presentation. I won't go into hardware support because that simply wants to make me cry. No hybernate or blue ray playback for me.

(posted from a Linux machine at home, here I can have some luxeries while my laptop has vista running somewhere)

Re:Worked out well?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Stop whining!
When I started using Linux I had to hand edit my x.conf file, and people would not believe there was another OS other than windows. Once you convinced them that you didn't use Windows the question EVERY DAMN TIME was "Why not?" With a look of you are out of your mind.

Also... Get off my lawn!
Or buy a Mac.

Re:Worked out well?

[DocHoncho]

Ahem...

...you are out of your mind.

..buy a Mac.

Re:Worked out well?

[IceNinjaNine]

Thanks for the information. And yes, I'm aware of that awesome processor known as the ARM. :)

Re:Worked out well?

[nukenerd]

What OS would you have used instead?

CP/M

Re:Worked out well?

[tehcyder]

and as you can probably tell from the landscape of the computer world today, the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed.

Worked out well for who? Microsoft? Okay, true. IBM? Nope. You and I? Nope. Other than a few pockets at MS, who did it work out well for?

It worked out well for the idea of having cheap computers available to (more or less) everyone, raher than being expensive machines only found in universities and corporate payroll processing centres.

And that is why the CS geeks here hate MS - they helped to make the computer democratic.

Re:Worked out well?

[tehcyder]

Then, as 16/32 bit processors started to appear, Unix could have been a contender, were it not for the DOS dominance.

Unix was expensive back then, don't forget, and required higher power hardware than DOS.

Re:Worked out well?

[shutdown -p now]

So you would use the one OS from which many of the pain points of DOS came from in the first place? What's the difference?

Re:Worked out well?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having been there with CP/M, I have to disagree. Just getting a file transferred from one brand pc to another was a huge effort of special disk format programs. Trying to get a printer to work required both programming and a soldering iron. No matter how much you hate Bill Gates or IBM, give them both full credit for standard interfaces and drivers. If you look at the current tablet and phone offerings of today, you will see how fragmented we were 30 years ago in the pc world.

Dang

[wmbetts]

This makes me feel old...

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[ginobarracuda]

PC-DOS (IBM's version) was faster, IMHO...

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[dingen]

I'm not an old fart. The oldest version of MS-DOS I've used that was current at the time was version 5.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[iggymanz]

who's depressed? The PC under CP/M would have been a better thing, as zcpr and other goodies added.

Yes but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Worked well for who? Could we imagine a world without Microsoft? Could it have been better than it is today?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[oldfogie]

OK, I'll admit it...

Damn, I'm old. I remember personal computers before IBM threw their hat in the ring. I lusted after microprocessors and blinking lights in an 8-bit world.

I'm so old I actually bought one of the SCP board sets (my first computer purchase! I could not resist the lure of 16-bit power), an S-100 mainframe kit, and started soldering.

My system came with DOS version 0.10, serial number 11 on an 8" 256K soft sector floppy (for my Cromemco 4FDC running a Persci 277 dual floppy drive). And I still have the assembler / linker / ROM monitor source on my hard drive (anyone else remember the trick 6-byte ASCII hex conversion?)

What's really amazing is that the skills I used for this are what I use every day in my job (embedded software for industrial controllers). I never learned Windows / Linux programming...

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Cro Magnon]

I'm an older fart than you. I think my first was 3.2.

Hey!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not crappy! They're vintage!

Besides, with a lot of them, adventure and rpg specially, you had to use your imagination to complete the mental scenery. Just like a reading book.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Samalie]

C:\OFFLAWN.COM

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[ginobarracuda]

Nice - my first computer-related job was running a Sierra Systems POS server (retail Point of Sale) that ran CP/M. DIRINT PIP FILINK

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[EraserMouseMan]

Those were the good old days. I remember my first computer as a kid. A true 8086 with a color CGA monitor and a 20mb hard disk and 2 x 5 1/2" floppy drives. Big pimpin' in those days.

inevitable joke

[abigsmurf]

C:\dos
C:\dos\run
run\dos\run

Re:inevitable joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe. That was funny 20 years ago.

Re:inevitable joke

[taiwanjohn]

About 20yrs ago was when I saw the bumper sticker: "C code. C code run. Run code run! Run damnit run!"

Re:inevitable joke

[sharkey]

DOS ain't done, 'til Lotus won't run.

Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Long-live 4DOS, Cygwin, and of course UNIX and Linux. I have *NO* fond memories of MS-DOS at all. Only frustration and a faint nostalgic feeling of "What the hell were they thinking by using backslashes?", the bane of touch-typists everywhere because they never had a standard keyboard position.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[hedwards]

I remember accidentally typing: del . and then instantly deeply regretting having hit the wrong key when it wiped out the entire filesystem.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[Dishevel]

4DOS was loved by me.
BTMs, Extended batch file commands, color, fun, fun, fun.
Made DOS usable.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[DeeEff]

To think nowadays this sort of mistake is made by DBANning the disk or "sudo rm -rf /*". And even though that's hard to do, it still seems common that people do this on advice of trolls.

I'm glad I'm just the right age to have never fought with this crap though.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[mcavic]

The backslash actually makes parsing slightly more flexible. For example, dir/s is a valid command in DOS, but it would be ambiguous in Linux.

Also, by giving the blackslash a real purpose, you make sure it appears on all keyboards, so it can also be used for ASCII art. :)

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[mcavic]

Also, remember the old DOS mantra: Restore is NOT the opposite of Backup.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[hedwards]

"sudo rm -rf /*" is by design, it's something that you have to be able to do in order for the system to function in a way that makes sense. There might be times when you really do mean to do that. And nobody should be typing a command in with sudo without knowing exactly what it's supposed to do.

DOS OTOH never had any concept of multiple users or elevated privileges which made it an even more obnoxious bug. On top of that there are times when one might want to delete a particular folder and everything in it, so it's not something that one would necessarily expect to nuke the entire system.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[Bing Tsher E]

You hit 'Y' that many times to confirm all the directory recursion as you felt your regret? Or did you just have the entire filesystem in the root directory of C:?

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[shutdown -p now]

del in DOS would only delete files, not directories. Giving it a path to a directory would be treated as a command to delete all files in that directory (non-recursively). So "del ." was equivalent to "del .\*.*", and that, just like rm, would prompt (Y/N) by default when it saw a wildcard - you'd have to use "del /q" for it to silently delete stuff.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[shutdown -p now]

del does not recurse by default. It would still prompt for every file being deleted for a command like that, though.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[owlstead]

The backslash actually makes parsing slightly more flexible. For example, dir/s is a valid command in DOS, but it would be ambiguous in Linux.

Which is why they don't use / for flags but - for short flags -- for full flags. And they do it way, way, way more consistently than DOS uses the / for sure.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[owlstead]

There were two things I loved about DOS: the way it went out of my face after starting up a game, and the feeling I got when I created the *ultimate* DOS config that freed up a whole 600K so that each game could actually start up (and included a mouse, sound *and* CD-ROM driver). Otherwise, it was utter *utter* crap even compared with MSX BASIC.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[mcavic]

You're right about the dash, but even that doesn't allow for the removal of the spacing. Not that we couldn't have lived with the extra spaces, but it is a convenience. One that I think Microsoft eliminated when they wrote their crappy XP Recovery Console. I guess calling it crappy isn't all that fair. It's a command prompt with NTFS support. But it's extremely crippled.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[DocHoncho]

Ah yes, one of the first things I pirated... after DOS 6.22. I wonder why there hasn't been a open source, MS-DOS-like replacement shell like 4dos for modern Windows. Cygwin is nice and all, but it's one huge hell of an installation (to make it usable in an expected fashion). cmd is absolutely useless.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[DocHoncho]

Don't be silly, given that \ is the "standard" escape character, every windows/dos path you might hard code in a string (one off scripts and the like) must be escaped so you end up with c:\\foo\\bar\\baz.txt
ICK!! At least scripting languages like python will accept a linux style path in lieu of a MS-DOS one. I routinely find myself retyping paths after having used / (the proper separator!!!) instead of \. Unfortunately for me I found myself at a "Microsoft Shop" so as a consequence suck up whatever sloppy shit Microsoft is excreting on the world this week.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[DocHoncho]

having to add spaces isn't all that convincing of an argument. Does it really impact your life that much that you'd have instead of "dir/w/a:d" you'd have to type "dir -w -a=d"? Or even better, in a script (for "documentation purposes") "dir --wide --attribute=d"

The DOS style of command switches sucks.

Re:Burn in hell, MS-DOS

[aiht]

Oh God, I used to hate 'restore'.
I can't even remember what it was supposed to do anymore, but it still sets off the "catastrophic data loss" warning bells in my head.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[idontgno]

Hell yeah!

If only CP/M-86 had even gotten into the x86 OS race... the things that might have been.

OTOH, we'd probably be complaining about Digital Re$earch's current anti-free-software FUD campaign and using the Gary Kildall borg icon.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Cue a gaziliion posts from kids who don't realize they'll be exactly the same in 10 years.... 9 years, 11 months, 29 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds... 9 years, 11 months, 29 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 58 seconds... 9 years, 11 months, 29 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 57 seconds...

ROM OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I miss the days of the ROM OS. Turn on the computer and it's booted and ready before the monitor was even warmed up. But even in the 80s Microsoft wrote bloated inefficient code. After using their Disk Extended Color Basic for several years I was able to rewrite the initialization code saving several hundred bytes, enough to add several customized DOS functions, and burned my own EPROM.

Re:ROM OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I modded my Commodore BASIC code myself! Changed that HORRIBLE blue-on-blue to white-on-black, among a bunch of other things, including some useful added commands. I miss the 8-bit days when you could upgrade your computer by adding chips with a soldering iron and some wire-wrap wire! Having a much closer relationship between the hardware and software made it much more fun to tinker. Now, we have Arduino (etc) which is cool... but not quite the same.

Re:ROM OS

[Megane]

But even in the 80s Microsoft wrote bloated inefficient code.

The TRS-80 Level II Basic was well written, even if it was an 8080 program with relative jump instructions (only the I/O drivers used IX, IY and the bit instructions). Back in the day I found 35 wasted bytes out of the 12K. There was clearly a lot of BillG code in there.

At the opposite extreme, the Colecovision's 8K ROM can easily have 1K optimized out of it.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[jimmerz28]

I remember reading the MS-DOS guide when we got our first Compaq computer (I think 2nd grade). Boy was that bland. And then when I switched to UNIX style all the commands were messed up!

I'm 26 though, so not quite an old fart yet.

Re:In some places...

[taiwanjohn]

Yeah, mostly on Linux boxes by old-fart gamers who need it to play Lode Runner or some other "legacy" diversion.

DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[dingen]

Of course MS-DOS, or any other DOS-like "operating system" (it's really nothing more than a loader) is utter crap when measured by todays standards. But because DOS was such a massive platform in its day, there is a gigantic wealth of applications and games for it. Especially most of the games are still great when played today. That's why DosBox is such an amazing piece of software: it lets anyone tap into that extremely large pool of really cool stuff. Even though I've played loads of those kind of games, I still discover new and fun ones from time to time and I have a great time with them. So I guess in the end, MS-DOS isn't so bad after all.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[iggymanz]

OS/2 was cool, and more than a loader

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[GooberToo]

OS/2 was the first real OS I used. Later I "upgraded" to windows, as forced by my employer. What a major step backwards, especially in usability and reliability.

I still remember when our OS/2 server was forcefully migrated to NT. Some bonehead left the CDROM drive open and had shared the drive. Later, when someone attempted to access the shared CDROM drive, the entire server hung waiting for someone physically in front of the computer to acknowledge the drive was inaccessible. Once someone clicked OKAY, the file server magically started serving files again.

There is literally nothing positive I can associate with Microsoft. The managed to damage an entire industry by making it acceptable to release known buggy and broken software.

Literally, anyone who considers MS to be a good technology company is an idiot. MS first and foremost has ALWAYS been one of the world's leading marketing companies. From a technology perspective, I doubt they'd rank in the top 100. Of course, reality and perception are two entirely different things.

Most people thing MS is a tech giant. They are not. They are a marketing giant specializing in the tech industry. Most people think Bill Gates is a business genius. He's not. He's a criminal thug who leveraged his subpar technology via marketing brilliance, sheer luck, and IBM's massive ego and ineptitude, to setback an entire industry almost two decades worth of advancements. That's not to say Gates is dumb. Its just that his prowess is constantly misunderstood by the general public.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[dingen]

I don't consider OS/2 to be a "DOS-like operating system", even though it has a DOS compatibility layer and is thus capable of running some DOS applications (including Windows 3).

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

(it's really nothing more than a loader)

Not true. DOS may be crap by today's standards, but at least give it credit for what it really is.
DOS includes file handling routines, memory management functions, a device driver system, and a number of hooks for expansion.
You probably wouldn't say what you said if you'd ever done any DOS assembly language hacking.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[iggymanz]

the first OS/2 was command line only, with very DOS-like commands.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[TheRaven64]

OS/2 was meant to be a successor to DOS, so it's not really fair to compare them. The first computer I got with DOS had an 8MHz 16-bit CPU, 640KB of RAM, and used 360KB floppy disks. And this machine was close to the high end for early versions of DOS. Running OS/2 on such a machine would have been impossible.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[dingen]

Thanks, I didn't know that. The only version of OS/2 I have used myself was OS/2 Warp 3.0. I assumed every version of OS/2 was always sort of like that one, but apparently that's not true.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[NJRoadfan]

If you can call this marketing brilliance.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmEvPZUdAVI

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[dkleinsc]

Of course MS-DOS, or any other DOS-like "operating system" (it's really nothing more than a loader) is utter crap when measured by todays standards.

Thing was, it was crap even by the standards of its own day. There were exactly 2 things it had going for it:
1. It ran on the IBM PC, which was a halfway decent hardware platform in 1981.
2. It was compatible with CP/M, which meant it supported some of the more popular applications at the time, like WordStar and dBASE right out of the box.

Other than that, it had nothing whatsoever to make itself any better than its competitors.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[Bing Tsher E]

OS/2 1.0 was from Microsoft (not IBM, though I think there may have been an IBM-branded version, too) and a text-only system.

I worked in a major company in 1998 that still had a lot of development going on in embedded OS/2. By then it was an aging, stinking corpse. The software engineers had to have two PCs in their cubes, old OS/2 boxes to develop on and 'doze machines to work with the rest of the company.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[Skuld-Chan]

The first versions of OS/2 didn't have a UI - that came out in 1.1.

OS/2 to me was very much dos like - especially from the command line. Same commands, same config files, a lot of the same syntax.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[iggymanz]

1.0 was from both IBM and Microsoft, they signed the Joint Development Agreement in 1985, the code name was CP/DOS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os/2#Development_history

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[Rockoon]

I still remember when our OS/2 server was forcefully migrated to NT.

When IBM and Microsoft parted ways on OS/2, IBM took the OS/2 2.x codebase and Microsoft took the OS/2 3.0 code base.

Windows NT was that code base. You simply upgraded to the next version of OS/2 as it was going to be.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[SnarfQuest]

MSDOS wasn't compatable with CP/M. They used different CPU's, and you could not run CP/M programs on MS-DOS. Those CP/M programs that ran on MS-DOS were converted/rewritten. It wasn't a simple process.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Most people think Bill Gates is a business genius. He's not. He's a criminal thug who leveraged his subpar technology via marketing brilliance, sheer luck

>criminal thug who leveraged his subpar technology via marketing brilliance, sheer luck

sorry to butt in while you're on your soapbox there, but isn't that the definition of business genius? no shit?

you don't give him enough credit either way, he's clearly an extremely skilled businessman. you don't pull a business from zero to top of your industry by being mediocre at business. he IS a business genius, and it is ridiculous to say anything otherwise. one of the most ridiculous things i've seen. i'm not supporting all of his methods, nor even most of them but the man KNOWS what he was fucking doing.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[shutdown -p now]

DOS was not only a loader - it also provided INT 21h, the API for file-level disk access (hence, "disk operating system"). A bunch of other stuff, too, but that was the most useful one.

As for DOSBox, one reason why it's so good at what it does is because DOS was as simple as it was, and because the hardware was that slow. The latter part makes straightforward CPU emulation viable, and simplicity of DOS itself makes guest/host interaction simple. I don't think we'll ever see it done just as well for XP, ever.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[Fred Or Alive]

Wow, that and the second half of the Windows 386 promo, you really wonder where you can get the shit the Microsoft marketing department used to smoke.

A random sidenote is that "No PC should be without it" was clearly something the Windows NT team believed, as AFAIK most of the MS-DOS tools in (32-bit) Windows NT (command, mem, edlin[1] etc) are from DOS 5 and were never updated.

[1] For some reason they never got rid of edlin in NT unlike DOS / Win9x where it disappeared around DOS 6. It was still around on my XP box, is it still around on 32 bit Windows 7?

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[GooberToo]

I know the history - but its not exactly what you say.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[Rockoon]

Wrong. It went down exactly how I said. OS/2 3.0 was doing to be called NT OS/2 until MS and IBM parted ways.

You claim to know the history, but you don't. Windows NT was everything that OS/2 3.0 was intended to be (hardware agnostic, and so forth), because it was in fact OS/2 3.0.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[NJRoadfan]

Neither video was really aimed at the direct public, but to product resellers. The vast majority of which likely never watched the tape.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[Fred Or Alive]

The fact that they were aimed at resellers [/ IT departments etc] doesn't make them any less funny though. Stupid marketing stuff is still stupid marketing no matter what the intended audience.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[dbIII]

It was actually utter crap as measured by the standards back then as well. The system running the Apple ][ and more importantly CP/M had a lot of features which MSDOS did not get until later or in some cases never got at all.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[GooberToo]

Whoosh. You making the assumption that just because MS walked away with the technically superior low level, everything was far more polished and complete on the surface. Nothing could be father from the truth. So factually, your implication is wrong and my somewhat dismissive response is spot on.

I'm not modifying history in the least - I'm simply putting it into proper context.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[tehcyder]

OS/2 was cool, and more than a loader

OS/2 was an alternative to Windows, not DOS.

Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome.

[tehcyder]

the first OS/2 was command line only, with very DOS-like commands.

OK, but very few people ever used that. Almost everyone's first experience of OS/2 was the GUI version, which was much much nicer than Windows.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn whippersnapper, I used CPM !

Worked out well for whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

"the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed". Did it now? It only worked out well for Microsoft. It did not work out well for IBM and it did not work out well for general interoperability.

Thirty and still living in its parents' basement.

[bitfarmer]

Bleary eyed, but still pretty good at playing some older games.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[camperslo]

Hold your tongue, ya young whippersnapper!

And respect your elders, ya peppy little spit-f*ck. (paraphrasing line to Zuckerberg-like character in Zombieland)

Revised title: "MS-DOS would have been 30 if it were still alive today".

A recent load of FreeDOS in a VM worked great. The larger download came with tons of cool software too, but so far Tetris is about the only thing easy to identify from the DOS filename. Sigh... (everything was identified with descriptions when installed, but we old fossils can't remember much stuff like that an hour later)
If there was supposed to be a launcher or menu I screwed up that part of the install.

http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/

Rather well for whom ?

[mbone]

...the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed.

Well for whom ? Bill Gates, sure. IBM wasn't very happy with it by the end. The rest of us...

Re:Rather well for whom ?

[hedwards]

are still trying to figure out how to get our TSRs to use himem so that we can play our games.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha! I got you all beat! My first DOS Version was just called 'Ugh'.

Pretty sure summary is incorrect

[straponego]

MS did not own QDOS when they sold it to IBM. Oh, and Bill Gate's mother was on the board of IBM. And what a crap OS DOS was; it held the industry back 10 years. Thankfully MS no longer has that sort of power; you could tell they were slipping when they failed to smother the Internet and force everybody onto MSN. Now, the only real drag they can impose on progress is via patent shakedowns.

Re:Pretty sure summary is incorrect

[Skuld-Chan]

What OS would you have picked to run on a machine that shipped with as little as 16KB of ram in 1981?

Re:Pretty sure summary is incorrect

[danomac]

and Bill Gate's mother was on the board of IBM

Really? That seems to be a slight conflict of interest issue.

Re:Pretty sure summary is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, GP doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Gates mother sat on the United Way board, and so did the IBM CEO. Some say this is way MS got the contract ([citation needed] for this) but MS at the time was already a well established company because of their Basic products.

And they did also owned QDOS at the time. Tim Paterson, the original QDOS author, even went to work at Microsoft later. It's not like they defrauded him or anything.

Kinda of interesting guy, Paterson. Worth reading: http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Softalk/Softalk.html about DOS and Paterson, hosted by himself.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[FurtiveGlancer]

I don't think the years matter nearly as much as all those long nights waiting for FDISK to finish running on a full-height 10MB Winchester disk drive.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[iggymanz]

we'd be running on Alpha chips!

The "right way"

[Quila]

One of mine said you have to declare any number you use as a constant in the beginning, and that means any number. If he saw a number used in your code, points taken off.

That meant "x*2" to double something once in your whole program was bad. You had to declare a constant in the beginning called "double" or some such, and then make it "x*double". A reasonably good practice taken to the absurd extreme.

Re:The "right way"

[idontgno]

And in any language or runtime that doesn't semantically provide for constants (i.e, they're protected from change)... well, use of named "constants" in those environments is the root of the phrase "constants aren't."

One careless assignment and all of a sudden "one" isn't 1 any more. Kinda explodes arithmetic.

Re:The "right way"

[goose-incarnated]

Well, he kinda had a point (according to his logic, anyway). I can sort of see the way his thinking ran: If you need to double something, its for a reason, right? Lets say that the reason is an achievement in a game, or a financial result of something ... whatever it is is irrelevant - lets call it FOO

Then, instead of writing this

/* Implement FOO */
int x = y * 2;

or this

#define FOO_MULTIPLIER (2)
int x = y * FOO_MULTIPLIER;

We should rather do this

#define FOO(src) (src * 2)
int x = FOO (y);

Of course, I regularly include magic numbers in my code wherever it makes sense, and I simply cannot see myself using a constant for what should be obvious, and if it isn't all that obvious, a macro with arguments makes more sense than a macro without.

Worked out well?

[Ralph Spoilsport]

and as you can probably tell from the landscape of the computer world today, the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed."

Worked out well? In what sense did it work out well? Economically for Microsoft and IBM? Perhaps. For the rest of the world that suffers working under the decrepit POS that is Windows OS? Not so much. IMNSHO, DOS was a terrific mistake and its adoption 30 years ago has directly hindered the development of the computer industry.

:START

[DocMAME]

ECHO ON ECHO HAPPY BIRTHDAY MS-DOS ECHO OFF The oldest version that I have ran is MS-DOS 1.25 on an old Toshiba laptop using bubble memory cartridges! SYS64738 DocMAME

Re::START

[Fred Or Alive]

You've got you're ECHO ON / OFF the wrong way round, I think:

ECHO OFF
ECHO HAPPY BIRTHDAY MS-DOS
ECHO ON

is perhaps more what you want. But the initial ECHO OFF is still echoed, so perhaps

@ECHO OFF
ECHO HAPPY BIRTHDAY MS-DOS
ECHO ON

is better, to suppress the initial ECHO OFF being itself echoed. But ECHO ON at the end of a batch file isn't needed, so it could be:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO HAPPY BIRTHDAY MS-DOS

without problems. Of course

@ECHO HAPPY BIRTHDAY MS-DOS

is even shorter, if you're only using a single command in a batch file, why have a second just to turn command echoing off when you could use @ to suppress echoing a single line?.

This pedantry brought to you by boredom, available now at all good newsagents. To celebrate MS-DOS I did actually test all the above by the power of COPY CON, as 64 bit Windows doesn't actually include MS-DOS support, so COPY CON in cmd.exe was the nearest I could get to the good old days (it's also probably better than EDLIN).

/ Some DOS 3.x version (3.31?) on a PC-XT clone with 512kb of RAM, EGA graphics and 10 whole megabytes of hard disk space was the first DOS for me.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue XKCD post to make almost everyone feel old:

http://xkcd.com/891/

took half that time to catch up to UNIX

[peter303]

To be honest, UNIX ran poorly on under-powered x86 chips until well into the 1990s. In fact MicroSoft owned PC UNIX, called Xenix , around the time it started DOS, then off-loaded it to SCO.

Re:took half that time to catch up to UNIX

[salesgeek]

8086 underpowered? Nah. Completely unsuited for a multitasking, multiuser OS? Yes. The 80286 (PC-AT) was a little better, but the problem it had was that it did not have memory protection or something that resembled a flat address space and memory was paged in 16KB increments, which made it a third class citizen in the Unix world. Porting software was rarely trivial (think re-writing data structures to deal with 16KB limits. That said, you could get a 16Mhz clone 286 to handle about eight terminals running WordPerfect and an accounting system. The problem with 286 Xenix was it was about the same cost as getting a 3B2 or other proper Unix machine once you added in all the hardware upgrades.

When the 386 showed up in 87 and 88, it really helped because you finally had a CPU built with the stuff a multitasking, multiuser OS needed... Porting software wasn't as difficult, and at the time SCO was doing a fantastic job with their product. Unfortunately at that time, Unix vendors (MS included) thought a single user license of Unix was worth $500 (except for Mark Williams, who had the Coherent Unix clone). It wasn't uncommon to hang 32 terminals on a 386.

Re:took half that time to catch up to UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

That's true. But to get a sane command-line with many Unix-like features, and without many of the worst warts of MS-DOS, you only had to run 4DOS. It was 10x better than any version of MS-DOS and was first available in 1989 at about the same time as MS-DOS 4.

In other words, DOS didn't have to suck as much as it did.

Re:took half that time to catch up to UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

You could multi-task Wordstar under CP/M (which Apple did not catch up to until the 21st Century.) Lucky for us that Gates beat Jobs but unfortunate that both beat the less marketing savvy others.

Happy B-Day DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Happy B-day DOS you have been a great help

Dos 1.0 and up

[rcoxdav]

My first computer was a Tandy 1000EX (then a 1000TX, 286, yeah baby). I got an expanded memory card for my 1000TX all the way up to1.5MB total RAM. Setup a RAM drive on the memory card and wrote a batch file to copy the OS and commonly used utilites to the RAM drive, then set the COMSPEC to it. Was really useful until I got a hard rive. I was working at Radio Shack at the time and made full use of my measly employee discount.

I sorta miss the days off Plug'n'Pray ISA cards (normally just manually set them anyway, as it never seemed to work). My experience with DOS 1.0 was on my uncles Zenith computer. I remember DOS 2.x needed the hard drive driver loaded to work off a hard drive. I used every version of MS-DOS from 2.11 on up. I hated the built in compression, in the later versions, too flaky. Version 5 and 6.22 were my favorites.

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, after 30 years I can upgrade!!

Does anyone know where I can get a copy of windows 3.0?

Re:Finally

[iggymanz]

screw that, go to OS/2 1.2, you'll be much happier and have much more functionality. The torrents are out there!

Win for almost everyone...

[Roger W Moore]

Sounds like a win to me.

Yes win for MS, win for IBM...shame about us users though, isn't it!

Re:Win for almost everyone...

[The Dawn Of Time]

Yeah all this cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing is terrible for users. We really lost.

Go ahead and predict the past future if things were the way you wanted them if you must, but that's a bankrupt exercise in wish fulfillment.

Re:Win for almost everyone...

[mjwx]

Yeah all this cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing is terrible for users. We really lost.

I'm guessing the GP is a Mac user, they get none of those things.

Re:Win for almost everyone...

[Tony]

Yeah all this cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing is terrible for users. We really lost.

I think you are confusing cause and effect.

Re:Win for almost everyone...

[Roger W Moore]

Yeah all this cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing is terrible for users. We really lost.

No, the cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing hardware was great it was just a shame it was typically crippled by MS-DOS. The speed difference of running code between MS-DOS 5.x (IIRC, may be 6.x) and Linux 0.99 on the same hardware was amazing to behold. Hence the reason MSDOS turned out badly for users is that it enabled MS to get a stranglehold on the OS market which, to a large extent, they still hold today. That killed a lot of competition and stifled innovation for quite some period

Re:Win for almost everyone...

[tehcyder]

Yeah all this cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing is terrible for users. We really lost.

No, the cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing hardware was great it was just a shame it was typically crippled by MS-DOS. The speed difference of running code between MS-DOS 5.x (IIRC, may be 6.x) and Linux 0.99 on the same hardware was amazing to behold. Hence the reason MSDOS turned out badly for users is that it enabled MS to get a stranglehold on the OS market which, to a large extent, they still hold today. That killed a lot of competition and stifled innovation for quite some period

You couldn't have run Linux or any other UNIX-like OS on the sort of PC hardware that was around thirty years ago when MS-DOS was created.

Re:Win for almost everyone...

[JabberWokky]

You couldn't have run Linux or any other UNIX-like OS on the sort of PC hardware that was around thirty years ago when MS-DOS was created.

You mean like Microsoft's other OS of the time, Xenix? It was the most installed Unix-like of the era, if the rumors I recall were correct, thanks to it running on low end personal computer hardware.

Alas, like Apple's DOS dominating the Apple ][ and crowding out the P-System or CP/M alternatives (the latter with the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard was great!), MS-DOS was cheap and "good enough" for the IBM-PC and clones. Plus there was the whole standards war between Berkeley flavor and System V, which gave us the great compromise of POSIX... but it took years.

Re:Isn't MS becoming irrelevant?

[HetMes]

The reason Microsoft is still the favored desktop OS is probably linux taking forever to get its shit together and create a user-focused OS like Ubuntu, giving Microsoft all the time it needed to create Windows 7. I remember well the many attempts I made with earlier linuxes, only to be disappointed each and every time because shit just didn't work. Ubuntu is a breeze these days, sure, but that's too little, too late. Linux has always, and still does to a large extent, lacked discoverability of features and solutions. I can still hardly imagine configuring a linux machine without access to internet forums answering very specific questions.

TSX was faster than PC-DOS

[buanzo]

then there was TSX Lite, which was 100% dos compatible, and had a DAMN FAST cache system. First start of nc would take a couple seconds as usual. Next invocation was almost immediate. I got the shareware version out of a bbs in the 90s.

Re:TSX was faster than PC-DOS

[erroneus]

And that's how Bill Gates knew the road to success was NOT building a better mousetrap, it was about distribution and critical mass. There were lots of "better things" at the time. It didn't happen because the people already had DOS. Not "better" but good enough and no one could tell the majority anything different. And things haven't changed that much in that regard -- lots of better things and not enough people using them.

Fortunately, there is Linux on most devices these days.

Re:TSX was faster than PC-DOS

[cavreader]

"Fortunately, there is Linux on most devices these days." Yeah it only took 30 years for the Linux phenomenon to ride to the rescue and it still hasn't broken MS dominance on the desktop which is what DOS was specifically built for. I don't remember any DOS smart phones out at the time so I guess we will never know how it would have held up as a mobile phone platform. But never fear I have it on good advice that next year will be the year of the long awaited Linux breakthrough on the desktop. Although this could be delayed due to some unspecified and minor legal issues that have not been completely ironed out yet. And of course the long awaited end of the desktop is still bound to surface sometime in the next 30 years and we can reevaute this issue again.

Re:TSX was faster than PC-DOS

[erroneus]

Don't have to remind me. But as things go, Microsoft is essentially "only" on the desktop and it's the desktop that is showing signs of being phased out in the future and Apple definitely seems to agree with that future vision. Will there be a time without desktop general computing? I would argue no because there still needs to be development and as far as I am capable of imagining things, in order to create software, hardware or whatever, there still has to be some essential needs to bootstrap the "whatever comes next" thing. But for most people, they'll get by just fine with their consumer devices. And those consumer devices will be web driven and will run "standards compliant" because the desktop with Windows will be significantly less significant for all of those consumer-oriented things.

Microsoft has repeatedly demonstrated that it cannot make its software scale down to the smaller, less powerful and more affordable (and disposable) consumer devices which are showing no sign of slowing down.

So you could say it's true that Microsoft will ALWAYS rule the desktop. But I think it's also true to say that the desktop will be less important and that Microsoft seems unable to remain relevant while the markets change. And that's why I said "fortunately, Linux is on most devices these days." I don't expect Linux to take over the Desktop and honestly, I never did. (Hoped and wished, maybe, but I would have been genuinely surprised) It's the changing market that will end Microsoft.

Re:TSX was faster than PC-DOS

[Bing Tsher E]

Fortunately, there is Linux on most devices these days.

Linux is just a continuation of 'good enough' actually. There's no top-to-bottom redesign there. Just kludging together something kinda like ol' UNIX.

Re:TSX was faster than PC-DOS

[erroneus]

That's only true if you are talking about Linux on the Desktop. I'm talking about where things are actually going -- appliances and consumer devices of all sorts which will need an OS capable of being small and efficient while also providing a UI which is focused on being standards compliant to better guarantee that all of these little devices can all work together in some way or another.

We all know that Microsoft [intentionally] fails on being standards compliant.

Re:TSX was faster than PC-DOS

[cavreader]

"Apple definitely seems to agree with that future vision" Apple has always kept tight control of the hardware platform their products run on and that almost put them out of business a few years back because they were being priced out of the market by commodity hardware. MS went the opposite route and targeted the commodity hardware platforms and that strategy served them well in the past. Thing's are different now and it will take time to see how it all works out in a few years time so I am not counting anyone out yet. I expect Apple to take over the #1 evil company title from MS in the near future so that will be fun to watch.

Re:TSX was faster than PC-DOS

[Bing Tsher E]

Yes, in a future where we are 'in a room full of twisty passages' they unfortunately won't be all alike. Or they will, but only at the lowest possible layer.

Where 'things are going' better not be mandatory implants. But they likely won't need to be mandatory. The little brats can be properly conditioned to walk everywhere with something running Linux cupped to their ear....

Re:TSX was faster than PC-DOS

[Runaway1956]

Microsoft's dominance is not due to DOS, or any other of their "innovations". Microsoft's dominance is due to those accursed "exclusivity" deals that MS demanded from all computer vendors. "If you want to market our products, then you ONLY market our products!"

Even today, it's difficult to find a state of the art consumer or business computer sold with anything other than Windows. Almost all offerings are machines that were state of the art 5 years ago, or more. If you want today's hottest CPU, blazing video, and all the peripherals, with Linux, you have to install yourself. Which is no big deal for a techie - but Mom and Pop's convenience store is almost forced to pay the MS tax.

Re:TSX was faster than PC-DOS

[cavreader]

Hate them or really hate them MS did what any other for profit corporation would do. Combining technology products, marketing, exclusive manufacturing deals, strategic acquisitions, and contracted delivery chains created one the most successful companies in the world. From a purely business perspective it's hard to argue with success.

IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[master_p]

By introducing such a lame technology like the IBM PC and MS DOS, IBM/Microsoft set back the IT industry 20 years or more.

We could have 32 bit machines with GUI, preemptive multitasking and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics much earlier.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[stox]

We already had all of those things prior to the release of the PC. Expensive as all hell at the time, though.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[walternate]

We already had all of those things prior to the release of the PC. Expensive as all hell at the time, though.

We had "32 bit machines with GUI, preemptive multitasking and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics" prior to August 1981? Any links/info?

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

DOS was just a gateway drug... :)

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, without Microsoft, we would have had a whole smorgasbord of competing, incompatible software and hardware.

That would have been a laugh.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Just Some Guy]

I had an Amiga in 1985 with all that except 2D instead of 3D. There were viable alternatives to DOS - and those of us happily using them laughed at the little single-tasking green screens with their beeps and text interfaces - but all of them but MacOS fell by the wayside for various reasons.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

GUIs are crap, talk about setbacks........gimme a command line any day.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[TomHeal]

By introducing such a lame technology like the IBM PC and MS DOS, IBM/Microsoft set back the IT industry 20 years or more.

We could have 32 bit machines with GUI, preemptive multitasking and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics much earlier.

I seem to remember that the hardware needed for multitasking and graphics were prohibitively expensive for the average computer user.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[lanner]

This comment is not to be understated. I was very young, but my first-hand experience comparison of what Apple and Amiga had at the time to what a Windows+DOS system could do makes it clear that half-assed triumphed over quality. People didn't know how to evaluate a computer when making a purchase, so they just bought something cheap that looked like a computer, even if it was inferior in regards to hardware and or software.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

i am not really understanding how the PC and DOS set back the IT industry by 20+ years. it was a great OS that didn't overuse the resources that "affordable" hardware of the time offered. when you have 16 to 64 KB of RAM in your computer, what the hell else do you want in an OS? you would simply want a very small footprint OS that allows convenient access to information on disks, and the ability to load executable code into memory and begin running it.

that's what DOS is. and as far as the hardware, more powerful systems, although the technology as there, would have been completely unaffordable to all but huge businesses. if anything, the IBM PC and DOS jumpstarted the consumer love-affair with computers and we would not be this far along without them. seriously!

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Osgeld]

yea cause being forced to use a 16 bit 4.7mhz computer at your desk was a huge stepback in 1981 you dink

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

However, it also directly led to today's "commoditization" of IT equipment and low-priced, cheap, Chinese-made hardware.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of companies, including IBM and Microsoft, were trying to sell 32-bit machines with a GUI or preemptive multitasking or memory protection and all of that stuff years before consumers bought into it en masse. And they did start buying into it about 15 years after the introduction of the IBM PC, not 20. That time frame can be shortened when you consider that no mainstream home computer OS offered that feature set until much later. Amiga, no memory protection. Which sucked. Atari SI, nice machine, but none of that (except the GUI) to my knowledge. Mac OS, no memory protection or preemptive multitasking. Even outliers like DesqView, well, no GUI. OS/2, now stop your gigling, didn't offer that feature set until 3 years prior to the introduction of Windows 95 (which is when consumers accepted that they needed those features).

And I honestly don't see where hardware accelerated 3D graphics fits in. That was the domain of high end workstations until the mid-1990s.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[salesgeek]

Google is your friend.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[walternate]

This comment is not to be understated. I was very young, but my first-hand experience comparison of what Apple and Amiga had at the time to what a Windows+DOS system could do makes it clear that half-assed triumphed over quality. People didn't know how to evaluate a computer when making a purchase, so they just bought something cheap that looked like a computer, even if it was inferior in regards to hardware and or software.

The first Amiga was launched 4 years after the IBM PC. The Commodore 64, which I had when it came out, was launched the year after the IBM PC.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[spitzak]

We had "32 bit machines with GUI, preemptive multitasking and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics" prior to August 1981? Any links/info?

Yes, stupid. Take a look at Sun, Apollo, and SGI.

All had bitmapped graphics (no window system, programs took over the screen), mice, and the SGI machines at least had hardware-accelerated 3D graphics (the hardware did matrix mulitplications and polygon fills).

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

DRI, the makers of CP/M since 1975 (on which Ms-DOS was based, or ripped off) released their multi-tasking and multi-user MP/M in 1978. This could run 3 or 4 users on a Z80 equipped with 256Kb of bank-switched memory and a hard disk.

In 1981 when MS-DOS 1 could only use 160Kb floppy disks, DRI had released MP/M II and MP/M-86 for the 8086 and 8088 and demonstrated Concurrent-CP/M-86 which was pre-emptive multi-tasking and did full virtual screen switching.

DRI also sold a million copies of GEM while MS wrote their inferior Windows 1.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[walternate]

We had "32 bit machines with GUI, preemptive multitasking and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics" prior to August 1981? Any links/info?

Yes, stupid. Take a look at Sun, Apollo, and SGI.

All had bitmapped graphics (no window system, programs took over the screen), mice, and the SGI machines at least had hardware-accelerated 3D graphics (the hardware did matrix mulitplications and polygon fills).

Thanks for calling me stupid, and then refer to companies and computers that didn't even exist when the IBM PC was launched. SGI was founded the year after and launched their first machine 3 years after the IBM PC. Sun was founded and launched their first machine the year after the IBM PC.

Apollo Computer was the only one of the companies you mention that even existed when the IBM PC was launched. It was founded the year before, and launched their first machine same year as the IBM PC. It did have a 16/32 bit Motorola 68000, not hardware accellerated 3D graphics.

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF, this is 5 insightful?
Yeah, thanks for nuthin IBM/Microsoft!
Why didn't you release a 32 bit GUI, preemptive multitasking, hardware accelerated 3D graphical OS for my 16bit 4MHz 640KB monochrome displayed floppy drive only computer you fucking lamers?
Why do I come here again?

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

(yes, that was later)

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

And HAM graphics!

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

By introducing such a lame technology like the IBM PC and MS DOS, IBM/Microsoft set back the IT industry 20 years or more.

We could have 32 bit machines with GUI, preemptive multitasking and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics much earlier.

What a load of bollocks, what's the point of statements like that?

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

GUIs are crap, talk about setbacks........gimme a command line any day.

They are good enough for Ellen Ripley they are the future baby!

Re:IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least.

[tehcyder]

This comment is not to be understated. I was very young, but my first-hand experience comparison of what Apple and Amiga had at the time to what a Windows+DOS system could do makes it clear that half-assed triumphed over quality. People didn't know how to evaluate a computer when making a purchase, so they just bought something cheap that looked like a computer, even if it was inferior in regards to hardware and or software.

The key to the success of the MS DOS PC was that it ran business software (Lotus 123, WordPerfect etc).adequately Most business users didn't and don't give a toss about pretty interfaces, high quality sound and video or anything else that made the Apple and Amiga better for many home users.

The only OS that stands against UNIX

[bigsexyjoe]

It's interesting, almost anything that isn't Windows is based on UNIX/Linux. (Maybe other things in embedded systems or whatever.) So MS-DOS is at the base of the only big alternative.

Re:The only OS that stands against UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows was only DOS based until XP, when the formerly server-oriented NT kernel came into play.

Say what you like about XP and its successors, but I'd suggest looking at the original NT design before bashing it. Its main problem is that MS didn't adhere to the design philosophy and instead allowed holes to be poked into the HAL via DirectX and other safety-bypassign subsystems.

Also, you're ignoring a huge number of embedded and small-processor platforms. It's not all PCs y'know.

Re:The only OS that stands against UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

this is incorrect. every NT-kernel based Windows release did not use DOS as a base, including the first one, Windows NT 3.1 release in 1993.

NT 3.x, NT 4.0, NT 5.0 (aka Windows 2000) all were DOS-less before XP was out. the last one to use DOS as a base was Windows ME, Windows 9x/ME really weren't "DOS-based" in the sense that DOS merely started loading them. once the windows kernel was running, the DOS API was not touched. the difference is that Windows 3.x and earlier still used DOS calls for many of it's functions, including file access as the most notable one.

Re:The only OS that stands against UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

So officially ever Mac OS before X was crap as the real world knew.

Re:The only OS that stands against UNIX

[spitzak]

NT still has drive letters and a lot of weird restrictions on filenames due to DOS, so it certainly is DOS-based.

You might as well claim Linux is not Unix-based because it has a kernel that was written after 1979. It still does not allow a forward slash in a filename, which is a feature that is there only because it is Unix-based.

Re:The only OS that stands against UNIX

[SnarfQuest]

MS-DOS was based on CP/M. CP/M command line was based on assorted DEC operating systems (rt11 mostly, IIRC).

Re:The only OS that stands against UNIX

[Hatta]

MS-DOS is dead. Windows is based on NT these days. NT was built by some of the same guys who did VMS. So it's more accurate to say we're looking at 2 major lineages, UNIX and NT/VMS.

Re:The only OS that stands against UNIX

[Hal_Porter]

It doesn't have drive letters internally - they're just symbolic links into the Object Manager's namespace

http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?article=381

So the "C:" seen by Win32 code is really a link to \Device\HardiskVolume1

And a native application doesn't have the restrictions on filenames.

NT based OSs have a VMS like kernel with a Win64, Win32 and originally Win16/Dos, Posix and character mode OS/2 subsystems on top.

Re:The only OS that stands against UNIX

[spitzak]

That's just being silly. Lots of Unix filesystems can technically put a '/' in the filenames. Does not mean it will work.

I don't think files that cannot be named by the majority of NT programs count. Therefore any restrictions in the WIN32 API are part of the definition of NT. They have relaxed some of these more recently but they are there still. Amazing they did not scrap this crap when they changed to wchar.

Re:Isn't MS becoming irrelevant?

[iggymanz]

eh, there is and has been windows versions for mobile and embedded devices, with more being developed. Windows Mobile 7 will support ARMv7. In a not totally unrelated aside, notice how many IT wares are at version "7" to ape Microsoft?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

My first PC was a Leading Edge Model D with a 20 MB hard drive. I upgraded it with a VGA card and a 8087 math co-processor so I could run fractal drawing programs in Turbo Pascal. Ah, the good old days...

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

As compared to, upbeat young fresh smelling farts?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[TheRaven64]

Those of us who grew up using CP/M still occasionally type cat into a UNIX shell and wonder why it's taking so long to list the contents of the directory...

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on slashdot. If the above post is truly insightful, then why haven't I learned anything of value from it?

Because it's not insightful at all, that's why. You've probably heard this a thousand times, but slashdot WAS better 10 years ago before it was overrun by teenagers caring more about personal bickering than technology.

I will guarantee you that not only was the above post written by a teenager, but everybody who modded him up is also in fact a teenager. Any modders care to refute this?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't mind if the people who run the company you work for, wax nostalgic, do you? Now get the f*ck off my lawn.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[erroneus]

Yes... and I have probably the worst possible reasons for wishing CP/M became the default OS on IBM PC. 1. I hate using the backslash for anything other than escape character sequences in programming. 2. I hate the idea of drive letters! Holy crap what a bad idea that was.

to everybody who says how crappy DOS is

[Anonymous Coward]

DOS was never intended to be a huge and all-powerful operating system. it was designed for the machines of the time, which were snails compared to the beasts you can buy today. you couldnt have the operating system eating up all your resources, because there wasn't much to go around. smaller was better. it did what it was supposed to do, and it did it reliably.

go back to the early 80's and try using an original IBM PC. the CPU is so slow you can usually watch the text being drawn out on the screen.

well to be more accurate, while the 8088 was brutally slow, it's not really what bottlenecked the text being drawn but the CGA video cards of the time had single-ported memory, meaning that if the CPU was accessing the video RAM while the card was also reading it to find out what to draw on the screen, you would get snow because the CPU was blocking it's access.

most DOSes and/or BIOS video routines wait until the monitor's vblank period, where it wasn't drawing the screen, before accessing the video memory. this is why the text updated so slowly that you could see it being drawn.

yes, computers fucking sucked 30 years ago. i'm not an old fart really, i'm only 27 but i have a soft spot for vintage computers. they bring back lots of good memories for me even though they are garbage in the technological sense. i'm in the middle of writing a full TCP/IP stack as a TSR in pure 8086 assembly, because i am a nerdpole. developing and testing the whole thing on my (still working!) 1982 IBM 5150 PC. it's two years older than i am. :)

Re:to everybody who says how crappy DOS is

[Hatta]

DOS was never intended to be a huge and all-powerful operating system. it was designed for the machines of the time

Compared to operating systems for other machines of the time, DOS still sucked.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[ColdWetDog]

Those were the good old days. I remember my first computer as a kid. A true 8086 with a color CGA monitor and a 20mb hard disk and 2 x 5 1/2" floppy drives. Big pimpin' in those days.

Color? You're indeed a child, grasshopper. Hell, we didn't have displays when I was a kid. Just teletypes. And we liked them (the dots from the punch tape were fun).

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[ears_d]

I kept a set of DOS 6 install disks, still in their original plastic bags.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

My first was 3.1. Remove the decimal point and that's higher than my age.

I'm a young old fart.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember thinking "Oh, great, I just got CP/M down and now I'll have to learn another OS."

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[ColdWetDog]

Haha! I got you all beat! My first DOS Version was just called 'Ugh'.

That was the one where you had to extinguish the little flaming torches that were used as memory indicators with your fingers, right?

Anybody know why DR couldn't seal the deal?

[Radical Moderate]

Obviously IBM was pretty damn generous in it's dealing with Microsoft, what the heck was Digital holding out for?

Re:Anybody know why DR couldn't seal the deal?

[Attila Dimedici]

Gary Kildall was not willing to sign IBM's Non-disclosure agrrement. IBM's NDA was much more complicated than anything he had dealt with up to that point. He was afraid that IBM would do to him what MS did to many small players in later years (and what IBM had done to many small players in the past).

Re:Anybody know why DR couldn't seal the deal?

[matria]

At the time, I understood it was something to do with the IBM non-disclosure agreement. DR's lawyers didn't like it. Gates was willing to sign anything to get the deal.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[gorzek]

I think I still have some MS-DOS 4.01 floppies somewhere. I should probably burn them to let the demons out.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[dingen]

Who else was checking if this filename doesn't contain more than 8 characters?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[realityimpaired]

*shrugs* I type "ls" into a Dos box often enough that I created an alias for it on my work system... :)

Hardly a win for IBM

[Radical Moderate]

Yeah, the partnership was so successful that IBM eventually launched it's own OS (OS2) in an attempt to retake the PC market, which failed and lead to their exit from the PC business all together. Yes, IBM survived, but it's a shadow of what it used to be. Ask any of their many ex-employees.

Re:Hardly a win for IBM

[Rockoon]

Yeah, the partnership was so successful that IBM eventually launched it's own OS (OS2) in an attempt to retake the PC market

Given this fact, none of your "points" seem to make sense. IBM was partnering with Microsoft to upgrade DOS to support the protected mode of 286's, and then later 386's, they were not "launching [their] own OS in an attempt to retake the PC market"

You did know that OS/2 1.0 was entirely written by Microsoft, right? Oh.. you didn't? Yeah. Thats why your opinion on these matters means less than nothing. You are ignorant of the facts.

Re:Hardly a win for IBM

[ajo_arctus]

IBM are now all about consultancy and services, which suits them rather well. They're also the number 2 tech company (by the crude measure of market cap), behind Apple but ahead of Microsoft. No, they're not #1, but they're hardly 'a shadow'.

Re:Hardly a win for IBM

[Isaac-1]

This is again one of those part truths, OS2 started out as a partnership between IBM and MS, but MS dropped out of the project so it could work on its development of Windows leaving IBM holding the bag. IBM really should have known better at this point for partnering with MS on this project since MS already had its own Windows platform well into development. Yet another example of IBM shooting itself in the foot.

Re:Hardly a win for IBM

[Isaac Remuant]

The world doesn't revolve around Desktop computers.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[erroneus]

Yes, I know CP/M also had drive letters too... still. CP/M did it better.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[gewalker]

CP/M had drive letters as well as the concept of default drive. Even worse, CP/M was using slash for command line options -- So arguably, DOS choosing backslash as the path separator made sense given in CP/M heritage — I.e., this particular form of brain damage was already baked into CP/M

Re:Isn't MS becoming irrelevant?

[ColdWetDog]

The reason Microsoft is still the favored desktop OS is probably linux taking forever to get its shit together and create a user-focused OS like Ubuntu, giving Microsoft all the time it needed to create Windows 7. I remember well the many attempts I made with earlier linuxes, only to be disappointed each and every time because shit just didn't work. Ubuntu is a breeze these days, sure, but that's too little, too late.

It has little to do with a good UI (look at the most popular OS on the planet, XP) - it has all to do with developers, developers, developers. That and Active Directory. Take away the need for commercial programs to require XP and come up with a good replacement for AD and then figure out how to support all that and Microsoft loses it's grip. Since that combination of factors is rather unlikely, Microsoft will be with us for a long while.

I expect to see XP running in the nursing home my wife stuffs me into when I get to be too much of a problem, likely twenty years from now.

Note to Time Travellers

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a time traveller reading this, take a hint... you know... hint, hint....

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Frig,
I'm so old I had to fix the MBR on a DOS 2.1 system and that was AFTER I'd been there a a couple of years.
I miss my Atari.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[smash]

I remember monochrome being preferable to CGA. I mean really, could they have picked a more hideous palette?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[JonySuede]

ms-dos with netbeui is still in use in some shitty but unkillable P.O.S. system, some old automation monitoring system and a countless list of old but supported embedded system so it is still alive. Unless you meant alive == Microsoft supported

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who else was checking if this filename doesn't contain more than 8 characters?

OFFLAWN.COM is 11 characters.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

We'd be fortunate if VMS had become mainstream instead.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[ColdWetDog]

Yes! The Hercules card. Best bit of hardware completely unsupported by software ever made.

yay for Copyright ...not

[spikenerd]

Wahoo! just 60? more years until science and the useful arts will benefit from this tremendous innovation as it finally falls into the public domain.

Re:yay for Copyright ...not

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't the designs for the original PC and XT in the public domain now? You could always run Minix 2 or FreeDOS on them.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[moonbender]

I didn't have to check, I memorized all 5.5E17 valid 8.3 filenames.

Though apparently character values 0x80 to 0xFF were also valid; I didn't memorize those because, really, who uses them?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[suso]

I think you're using the wrong OS.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Billhead]

You have just revealed that you are not an old fart.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Bing Tsher E]

Cue a gazillion posts by depressed old farts noticing that they are, in fact, old farts.

Who'd depressed? I got to be an adult through the 80's, 90's and the 00's. You young punks get to clean up the shit from our partying.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[mcavic]

I'm an old fart at 34. After ditching my Commodore 64 and 128, I bought myself a 386. It was assembled in Sioux City, South Dakota, came in a big cow-spotted cardboard box, and cost about as much as my first car. I still have the receipt. I'm not sure, but I think it was fast enough to have 1:1 disk interleaving.

Later, when I started college, it was the last year that they taught Pascal. Good riddance. But I had loads of fun learning Assembly. Once I was helping out a classmate with her project. Each time she ran it, it crashed the PC, and after rebooting, it came back with No Boot Device. Obviously she had accidentally found a way to wipe the CMOS. Really quite an accomplishment. The lab was minus a few machines that day.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[BlueScreenO'Life]

You spoiled brats with your hard drives...

A:\OFFLAWN.COM

Misleading headline

[MaxToTheMax]

MS-DOS did not live to be 30.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Savage-Rabbit]

They're so old, their Slashdot IDs are negative.

Negative??? Is that the best you can do?

How about this: I am such an old fart that my .vi file is older than you and most of your friends you basement dwelling, tissue-mountain constructing, Twitter-tweeting, Facebook drone.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[dnormant]

More importantly MS-DOS 1.0 didn't support hard drives. That wasn't until MS-DOS 2.0.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Bing Tsher E]

I have PC-DOS 1.0. Not just copies of the disks. Original disks and the boxed manual.

And as I've run it, I think that $25,000 was about what Microsoft should have paid for it. They put a whole lot of improvement into 2.1 and 3.1, etc. Never use a dot zero release. 2.0 had weird bugs. 4.0 was an abomination.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Bing Tsher E]

I loaded the high speed paper tape reader from a switch-panel bootstrap on a PDP-8 system to get my first college-level programming assignments completed. It was to load the FOCAL interpreter.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Jim Hall]

A recent load of FreeDOS in a VM worked great. The larger download came with tons of cool software too, but so far Tetris is about the only thing easy to identify from the DOS filename. Sigh... (everything was identified with descriptions when installed, but we old fossils can't remember much stuff like that an hour later)

And you may be interested to know that FreeDOS is still being developed. We're working on a FreeDOS 1.1 distribution (mostly an update to the 1.0 distribution, plus a few noticeable changes.) We are discussing an August release. After that, we will start planning the "2.0" distribution, which I hope will see a "modernization" of what a DOS system should look like in 2011.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[CSMoran]

There was a second mode where the cyan+magenta was replaced by orange+green, I believe.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Bing Tsher E]

No, the biggest part of the reason why CP/M wasn't the default IBM-PC operating system was specifically because of Kildall's personality. He was both laid back and a little arrogant. It took a hustler like Gates to win the deal from IBM. Kildall wouldn't be a borg icon for both reasons: he really couldn't have stricken a deal with IBM, and if he had, his company's output wouldn't have spawned the 'clone wars' the way Microsoft did. We'd probably all still be running shitty PS/2 machines that were crippled 'smart terminals' plugged into IBM mainframes.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[leucadiadude]

Nice to see someone with a lower number than me from time to time....where's that damn cane?

Wait, what was I saying again?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[CSMoran]

Each time she ran it, it crashed the PC, and after rebooting, it came back with No Boot Device. Obviously she had accidentally found a way to wipe the CMOS. Really quite an accomplishment.

That would yield a "CMOS checksum error", not "No boot device".

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Bing Tsher E]

FDISK didn't take long. The low-level formatting you had to perform before FDISK, though, could take quite awhile. If you were using one of the original HD controllers in a real IBM-XT there wasn't even anything displayed on the screen to tell you it was completed... You just had to wait until the light went out on the Hard drive and issue a debug command to read the status register on an I/O port to see if it completed properly. It was easier with the later Western Digital 8-bit controllers that the young whippersnappers had, with the built in text/graphical low-level formatting menu.

Why did IBM need an outside OS?

[condition-label-red]

I have always wondered why IBM went shopping for an outside source to provide the OS for their new PCs? It wasn't like IBM didn't have tons of in-house OS expertise already.

Does anyone have the backstory?

Re:Why did IBM need an outside OS?

[gl4ss]

because "ibm couldn't hack it". they just could not have come up with something so simple probably, you know, because it's a step back from what ibm had done in the past before that. and because of memory, cpu, development time etc. constraints, it was exactly what was needed. had it been an inside job the shell would have been way more complicated and they could not have ever come to agreement how to do it internally. you see, once you describe the simplicity that is dos 1.0 you start to think that it's just a bootloader and that no engineer would ship something like it. except that it was exactly what was needed, it just needs to jumpstart some programs. while those self boot pc games were quite cool, they were never as practical as the dos games..

of course, i'm just pulling this out of my black authentic stetson. because that's how big companies work. they end up being so "high quality" that they can't do any simple projects in-house. (also using outside vendor might have boosted the credibility of the system as something not only dependent on ibm, current companies do shit like that too, even spinning faux independent subsidiaries for making the appearance to be working with an outside force).

Re:Why did IBM need an outside OS?

[spitzak]

I would say this is true. You can see what IBM *did* design in the IBM-PC. For instance the totally useless "bios" calls.

The best example was the official way to put a character on the screen. I'm sure IBM asked Microsoft what BASIC needed to do, and they probably said "put a character at the cursor, and some way to move the cursor around". IBM then dutifully implemented the BIOS with TWO calls, one that placed a character at the cursor and did not move it, and another that moved the cursor. Unbelievable. If you took the stupidest programmer in the world, you might expect that they would make an api that took one call per character. IBM managed to make it take two!, thus proving they were stupider than the stupidest programmer I can imagine!

(in case you are wondering, any mildly intelligent programmer, even with the incredibly limited resources of the IBM PC and a 1 or 2K bios, would have easily made an api that took a pointer and a length of characters and put them on the screen. They may have even interpreted return/line feed and even escape sequences. The history of the PC and clones may have been far different, because programs for the PC would not have bypassed the bios as much to update the screen. Early attempts at multitasking and windowing would have been much more likely to work. Microsoft would likely have been faced with a lot more competition long before Windows came out).

Re:Why did IBM need an outside OS?

[SnarfQuest]

IBM didn't want to spend an ungodly sum to develop an operating system for a small volume product. They didn't expect the PC to become so popular so fast. It was designed to fill a niche in their product line that some of their customers wanted filled.

Re:Why did IBM need an outside OS?

[X3J11]

I would say this is true. You can see what IBM *did* design in the IBM-PC. For instance the totally useless "bios" calls.

The best example was the official way to put a character on the screen. I'm sure IBM asked Microsoft what BASIC needed to do, and they probably said "put a character at the cursor, and some way to move the cursor around". IBM then dutifully implemented the BIOS with TWO calls, one that placed a character at the cursor and did not move it, and another that moved the cursor. Unbelievable. If you took the stupidest programmer in the world, you might expect that they would make an api that took one call per character. IBM managed to make it take two!, thus proving they were stupider than the stupidest programmer I can imagine!

(in case you are wondering, any mildly intelligent programmer, even with the incredibly limited resources of the IBM PC and a 1 or 2K bios, would have easily made an api that took a pointer and a length of characters and put them on the screen. They may have even interpreted return/line feed and even escape sequences. The history of the PC and clones may have been far different, because programs for the PC would not have bypassed the bios as much to update the screen. Early attempts at multitasking and windowing would have been much more likely to work. Microsoft would likely have been faced with a lot more competition long before Windows came out).

INT 0x10 / AH = 0x13 - write string.

The string, pointed to by ES:BP, can optionally contain attributes.

DOS also provided 0x21/9 to print a string terminated with $, but you're talking about the BIOS, so that's moot.

Not moving the cursor after every text write actually made more sense - consider a program that used a text mode "GUI" to present its data. The drawing routine could just blow through, displaying the interface WITHOUT the overhead (however little, but consider the speed of the computers back in these days, when every ounce of performance counted) of moving the cursor. Finally, when input was expected, the cursor could be positioned at the right "GUI" element to make apparent it was waiting for something. Of course, most programs bypassed the BIOS for all but the simplest of tasks, writing directly to the display memory. But even then, a separate "move cursor here" function was a necessity.

Sure there's lots to bitch about wrt to the original PC, its BIOS and DOS, but this wasn't one of them (IMHO).

Re:Why did IBM need an outside OS?

[spitzak]

I think you are confusing the fact that it was impossible to change any character on the screen other than the one under the cursor. Yes it might make sense to have a different call that moved the blinking cursor indicator, but that was not done. You had to move the "cursor" to change where the other bios call updated the sceen. Therefore unless your gui worked by changing only a single character on the screen, which happened to be exactly where you wanted the blinking cursor, you had to use this move-cursor call if you wanted any changes.

I'm not sure about the 0x13 bios call, there was a reason nobody (including that DOS write-string call) used it. I think it may have ignored the cursor position? The only working way to use the BIOS to update the screen with any ability to position the cursor was to call set-cursor-postion and write-character alternately for every single screen location on the screen. Obviously no sane programmer did this on a 5Mhz machine.

Re:Why did IBM need an outside OS?

[goose-incarnated]

I'm not sure about the 0x13 bios call, there was a reason nobody (including that DOS write-string call) used it.

Yes. Yes there was. It was slow. Very very slow. So, we simply wrote to whatever framebuffer was available depending on the graphics card that was installed. Much faster.

Re:Why did IBM need an outside OS?

[X3J11]

I think you are confusing the fact that it was impossible to change any character on the screen other than the one under the cursor. Yes it might make sense to have a different call that moved the blinking cursor indicator, but that was not done. You had to move the "cursor" to change where the other bios call updated the sceen. Therefore unless your gui worked by changing only a single character on the screen, which happened to be exactly where you wanted the blinking cursor, you had to use this move-cursor call if you wanted any changes.

The function I referenced did in fact take a coordinate pair in the DX register, implying (I say implying because I have not the facilities to craft a suitable test given my operating system) it would write to where the programmer specified, not to the current cursor position. See here. Had to Google for that, having misplaced by copy of the book - ahh, Ralf Brown's Interrupt List... that takes me back.

I'm not sure about the 0x13 bios call, there was a reason nobody (including that DOS write-string call) used it. I think it may have ignored the cursor position? The only working way to use the BIOS to update the screen with any ability to position the cursor was to call set-cursor-postion and write-character alternately for every single screen location on the screen. Obviously no sane programmer did this on a 5Mhz machine.

Lots of insane programmers did, however, use it. It was "official", therefore it must have been the proper thing to use. Microsoft discouraged programmers from using tricks to make things work better.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

one of the strangest things was that you could name a file with the sigma character (The one that was to let the OS know that the file could be written over.) and it would display.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Bing Tsher E]

What computer did you have that had an 8086 processor and a CGA monitor?

One of the early 8086 systems, the AT&T 6300, didn't have a CGA monitor. It had a double-res workalike with 400 lines, but it wasn't CGA.

Very few machines in that era except for the AT&T 6300 had an 8086 processor. Most had the 8088, which IBM selected because the 8-bit wide data path keep costs considerably lower in the initial rollout. There's no equivalent to the 8255, 8237, etc. for the 16-bit data bus.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Lashat]

I have fix for that. OFFLAW~.COM

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[CSMoran]

C:\OFFLAWN.COM

Why not drop the .com altogether?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Bing Tsher E]

What are you talking about? The Hercules card was a third-party addon. The Monochrome card on a true-blue IBM is text-only. It has just the amount of memory needed to display 80 x 25 characters. The memory map area you write character data into is exactly the same memory that the 6845 chip uses to throw the characters up on the raster display. Back then memory was really really expensive, so the card only had the 4K of memory required for the 80 x 25 display.

Many people forget that the original IBM-PC motherboards were populated with from one to four rows of 9 16K x 1 DRAM chips. The base configuration was the first row of 16K soldered on the motherboard, the extra three rows were to expand to 64K. You could torque it out to 384K with plug-in cards, but there were only 5 ISA slots so you had to be conservative.

The original MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter) card was multifunction, though. It also had a parallel printer port!

My days with DOS...

[antdude]

I used (not MS) IBM-DOS v4.0 that was terrible with its low free conventional memory on my IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 10 Mhz system. 5.0 and 6.0 were awesome though. I remember its DOS Shell too. Then, came DoubleSpace (Stacker died -- I used its software, but not its hardware card), disk defragger (Norton Utilities 8.0's was better, but there was a nasty bug if you had verify=on setting that corrupted the data!), a virus scanner, etc. Oh and multi-configurations with autoexec.bat and config.sys. Fun times! :D

Digital... sigh

[sgt scrub]

The real slap in the face was when the Alpha 443a had bios changes to allow NT to be installed on it. I'm glad I'm not using my real name because I have to admit, a tear ran down my face.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[PwnzerDragoon]

One of those characters is blank in the standard USA ASCII character set. You could use that one to insert what looks like a space in your filename, and confuse the hell out of anyone trying to access it from a prompt. "How the hell did he get a space there? And why does DOS keep telling me the file doesn't exist when I try to view it?"

Still Alive And Active

[Ngarrang]

I work in a manufacturing environment, a realm of time forgotten, where software once written never changes and geek has to keep an active reference machine alive for every Microsoft OS. I am still actively using MS-DOS 6.22 on machines that running test diagnostics. The old QuickBASIC program uses the serial port and does some simple things to the system to which it is connected. And I cannot escape this fate.

Re:Still Alive And Active

[SnarfQuest]

A few years back, I saw a NCR machine using a PDP-8A as a controller. It worked, so why replace such an expensive machine.

Re:Still Alive And Active

[shutdown -p now]

If all that the machine does is what you describe, then what's wrong with using DOS? It gives you almost the bare minimum you need, and little extra; and it doesn't get in your way like a full-fledged OS would. In effect, you're using it as a glorified loader for your program, nothing more.

Ditto for QBASIC - as I recall, it had integrated language features specifically to work with serial ports. I remember that you opened it as a file named "COMx:", but could also add various parameters specifying baud, parity etc; and you also had the ON COM ... GOSUB statement that let you easily hook up signal handlers for available input. Not that you couldn't do it all in C, but it would probably be several times longer, so why bother?

Re:Still Alive And Active

[camperdave]

I work in a manufacturing environment, a realm of time forgotten, where software once written never changes and geek has to keep an active reference machine alive for every Microsoft OS. I am still actively using MS-DOS 6.22 on machines that running test diagnostics. The old QuickBASIC program uses the serial port and does some simple things to the system to which it is connected. And I cannot escape this fate.

Can you not echo the same character strings to a serial port from a linux box? Serial I/O ain't that hard.

Re:Still Alive And Active

[EETech1]

I wrote some programs like that when I used to dyno test race engines to help with keeping track of the various break-in procedures. It started as a way to help keep track of the complicated break-in schedule, and I gradually added manual data recording, and then later built an interface card to read torque, rpm, fuel flow, and interface to the scan tool for fuel injected engines. It then calculates correction factors and prints a dyno sheet, updates the operators time control, and bills the time to the proper accounts.

It is still running on the same 286 laptops I wrote it on. On some dyno cells it runs on windows xp and I have updated it to store the runs on a network disk, and I can remotely add and modify different runs for different engines. It has survived the dreaded Y2k, ISO certification, gets yearly calibration, and gives me very little trouble. I'm the only one who supports it, and over the last 15+ years it has been running all day, 5-6 days a week running thousands of engines on 8 different dyno cells.

I remember poking every address in a loop (crashed many times) to find the various pins on the parallel port, and the rs-232 flow control pins, and waiting code to make the parallel port into an 8 way SPI bus to control DACs and ADCs that connected to the existing analog control system.

Ahh... The good old days!
You guys are welcome on my lawn most any time!

Cheers!

Re:Still Alive And Active

[tehcyder]

I work in a manufacturing environment, a realm of time forgotten, where software once written never changes and geek has to keep an active reference machine alive for every Microsoft OS. I am still actively using MS-DOS 6.22 on machines that running test diagnostics. The old QuickBASIC program uses the serial port and does some simple things to the system to which it is connected. And I cannot escape this fate.

If you were that bothered you'd get another job. Real life is different from studying computer science at college.

Re:Still Alive And Active

[tehcyder]

Can you not echo the same character strings to a serial port from a linux box? Serial I/O ain't that hard.

As the system is obviously working fine as it is, what would be the point of that, other than to prove you are clever and don't like Microsoft?

Re:Still Alive And Active

[Ngarrang]

I work in a manufacturing environment, a realm of time forgotten, where software once written never changes and geek has to keep an active reference machine alive for every Microsoft OS. I am still actively using MS-DOS 6.22 on machines that running test diagnostics. The old QuickBASIC program uses the serial port and does some simple things to the system to which it is connected. And I cannot escape this fate.

If you were that bothered you'd get another job. Real life is different from studying computer science at college.

This fate pays well for the now.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[davidnm]

I must be real old. Thank god I didn't register when I first started reading SlashDot or I'd be a 3 digit ID.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[hotfireball]

Never use a dot zero release.

OK, cap! :-)

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[titten]

Hehe, I've actually administered Alcatel telephony switches running CP/M on a 286-chip...

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[deets52]

alt+255
I used to do that to hide files from people at work. Most people didn't even notice the extra lind in the dir output if you created a directory named with just one alt+255. The same with a space as the first character for the most part.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Runaway1956]

Seriously? I went straight from DOS 3.2 to MSDOS 5, then MSDOS 6.2 I never saw or used a DOS 4, or any verion, or of any flavor.

Oh - BTW - I didn't use MSDOS 3.2 - it was TRSDOS and DRDOS for me. I have little idea whether TRSDOS was licensed from MS or not, but I think we all know that DRDOS was openly competing against MS. Thanks to MS dirty tricks (done dirt cheap) DRDOS finally went belly up.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Runaway1956]

Forget the monitor nonsense. The youngster said "hard disk". We booted from floppy, and cloaded our programs!

Compressed mode

[Anonymous Coward]

MS-DOS always lagged behind DRI's products. DR-DOS 6 had disk compression a year before MS-DOS 6 was released.

It was DR-DOS that forced MS-DOS to improved. MS was happy to just keep pushing out 3.3 with its 32Mb disk limit while DR-DOS 3.4 could run 500Mb disks. MS was forced to release MS-DOS 4.01 which IBM had written. Then DR-DOS 5 started eating MS's lunch and got to about 15% market share before MS-DOS 5 came out. Soon after that DR-DOS 6 was leading on features while MS relied on illegal 'per box pricing' to hold onto the market.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[gorzek]

I recall that 4.0 was a total disaster, and 4.01 was Microsoft's attempt to improve it. It wasn't bad, but we did upgrade the 286 to 5.0 as soon as that came out. Much, much better (as MS-DOS versions go.)

I remember troubleshooting some DR-DOS systems back in the day. Didn't seem too bad of a DOS clone.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[spitzak]

More importantly MS-DOS 1.0 didn't support hard drives. That wasn't until MS-DOS 2.0.

Actually it did (they were 5-10 Megabytes, and looked just like the floppy drives, and drivers had to be written, nothing came with DOS). What MS-DOS 1.0 did not support was hierarchical file systems. The '\' would have been considered the first character in the filename, I think then the file system would have rejected it as an invalid filename.

Old Computers

[rossdee]

I bought an Amiga 1000 on 26-Jul-86

7 years earlier I had bought my first computer (a TRS80)

In 1980 I bought my 2nd computer, that one had color, a disk drive and a keyboard with 117 keys (Compucolor II )

I didn't buy an MS-DOS machine until 1994

The machine I used the longest was an Amiga B2000 1988 to 2002 (I sold it because I left the country, it was still going at the time)

And to those people that say I am old, I'd just like to point out that I work with people who are 50 years older than me.

Re:Old Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a greensman at a cemetery? :-)

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[shutdown -p now]

Well, MS-DOS didn't really have a concept of "file system driver". So what you describe, so far as I can tell, could only be done by hijacking INT 21h, and redirecting any file I/O requests with paths that you care about to your own code. At that point, you aren't really using anything from DOS, so whether the result is meaningfully a "DOS driver" is debatable.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit later you could get a small speed-up by replacing the 8088/8086 with a NEC V20/V30 chip. This had a few extra instructions, but more importantly used fewer clock cycles in many common operations.

Theres an app for that

[Anonymous Coward]

you could've gotten a click disabler from aminet. You still had disk detection with the disabler on. Pretty cool.

Still having fun with my newly bought A1200. 8meg GVP '030 50, indivision.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Applekid]

They're so old, their Slashdot IDs are negative.

Negative??? Is that the best you can do?

How about this: I am such an old fart that my .vi file is older than you and most of your friends you basement dwelling, tissue-mountain constructing, Twitter-tweeting, Facebook drone.

Tissue mountain? Pfft, it's a fort. Fort Excelsior. Where I plan my D&D campaigns.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[HermMunster]

Wrong version of the file system. That came many years after DOS.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[shutdown -p now]

Curiously enough, you can still download legit images of DOS 6.20 and 6.22 floppies from MSDN if you're a subscriber. I wonder if they come with any kind of support. ~

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[shutdown -p now]

I hope will see a "modernization" of what a DOS system should look like in 2011.

Inquiring minds want to know whether we'll get a GUI version of debug.com. ~

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Hal_Porter]

It did.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[HermMunster]

The summary is technically incorrect. Near the end it states that Microsoft had years under its belt with MS-DOS and Basic. The mistake in the summary is that they had years of experience with MS-DOS--that didn't even exist as a product at the time.

It had years under its belt with Basic which was written initially by stealing Harvard computing power (Paul Allen wasn't a student and Gates was just a deadbeat about his classes, none of which at the time were computer related). And the language itself was a rip off of the language invented by two other professors from a different school.

Years earlier, as kids, Gates and Allen both had been in trouble with the law for hacking and stealing time-share minutes. Back then those were significant costs to anyone using them. Instead of being prosecuted they were hired to test for faults and weaknesses in security.

It was Allen who knew of the SCP QDOS. Gates essentially lied to IBM knowing that he could gain control of QDOS. In Microsoft taking over QDOS, SCP retained rights to any and all changes made by Microsoft, and were owed royalties. Microsoft failed to pay those and SCP owner who was going bankrupt sued Microsoft and won. He paid his debts and had a little left for retirement. MS-DOS wasn't created till after IBM-DOS had been out for some time.

So, they stole computing time from private companies and were forgiven for being so brilliant. Then later they were to steal computing time again, knowing it was illegal, from Harvard, to write an emulator for the 8086 instruction set so they could write their version of Basic which was stolen from two professors from another major university. They then used that to make a company (pirates benefiting commercially from their theft), and in the process Gates tried to screw Allen by, during his convalescence where he nearly died, by getting Ballmer to connive to gain control of his stock. And, during the negotiation process of deciding how to split the shares upon creation of the new business, Gates decried Allen because he'd become an employee of MITS and thus apparently deserved fewer shares, when after then agreement about the split, a few weeks (months) later, Gates was also an employee of MITS. Then, Gates and Allen had the gall to write open letters to others about stealing software. The reality is, that Gates and Allen had stolen considerable sums by then.

Perspective from somebody already programming

[shoor]

Olt-timers eh? OK, somebody's going to outdo me in the oldtimer department (at least I hope there's people older than me out there), but I haven't seen one of their posts here yet.

My credentials, I did my first, admittedly almost insignificant, bit of programming in 1966 on a PDP 8 in Fortran using punch cards. It was bad enough to make me stay away from computers for 10 years (4 of those years being in the Navy during the Viet-Nam War), but even so, I had a few years experience programming in assembler before the IBM PC came out. What made me mad was that IBM used the 8086 when the Motorola 68000 was already out, and even the Zilog Z-8000 was a lot better than the 8086. But the uninformed masses were oohing and aahing because of those 3 letters, 'IBM', on the side of the box.

I remember at my job back then, the hardware guys were always complaining about how the company we worked for always went with IBM components when somebody else's were a better deal. Hardware and software wise, it seemed like the PC was as bad as it could be and still sucker people in to using it. MS-DOS fit right in with that philosophy. (I've read that IBM's intentions were not a mass market computer but something to interface to their mainframes. I don't know if that's true, but it could explain a lot about their approach.)

Back in the 70s there had been a heady idealism about computers. Go look in old BYTE magazines to get an idea. Look at Dr Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia (Running Light Without Overbyte) for an even better idea. My brother, the hardware guy, built a homebrew computer with 256 bytes of eprom that we programmed using DIP switches so that it could read a hex touchpad. I think he got the basic plan from the 8080A Bugbook. So many possibilities! The idealism of the 60s about a lot of things was depleted, but with the home computer, it was still there. The IBM PC put an end to that as far as I'm concerned. Maybe if they had gone with Gary Kildall's operating system it would have been OK. I recommend looking for saved videos of the old Computer Chronicles TV shows hosted by Stewart Cheifeit which had Kildall as a frequent guest.

Re:Perspective from somebody already programming

[tehcyder]

The thing is, if all you idealistic hardware and software geniuses could come up with something so much better than the IBM PC, why didn't you?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[innocent_white_lamb]

Just use a question mark in place of the unknown character.

They did not buy 'the rights' for QDOS.

[drainbramage]

They procured a limited set of rights.
Hence the eventual success of the lawsuit against microsoft.
As I recall it Microsoft did not 'own' the code and did not have the right to license it to IBM.
I am as shocked as you that microsoft seems to have ignored a restricted license and then trampled a company via lawyers.

CP/M - better than MS-DOS?

[mbilz]

See below for what MS-DOS could have been, but wasn't. It's an excerpt from Dr. Peter Denning's Book, "The Innovator's Way: Essential Practices for Successful Innovation, MIT Press (2010)." It shows how Bill Gates, who had an inferior OS ("It took Gates another ten years to get the quality of MS-DOS up to the original CP/M system") but a better business acumen, won out and got rich. "Gary Kildall was the true father of the personal computer operating system. In his PhD research at the University of Washington in the early 1970s, he worked with one of the best-designed operating systems of all time, the Burroughs B5500, becoming thoroughly familiar with advanced concepts such as multitasking and interactive computing. Shortly thereafter, while an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, he acquired one of the new Intel 4004 process control chips for his lab. He soon realized that the 4004 was a general-purpose computer and not just a special purpose chip. He designed an operating system that used a floppy disk as its memory and incorporated the advanced concepts he had learned about operating systems. This program was called CP/M, for “control program, microprocessor”. Intel contracted with him to develop CP/M and an associated portable programming language PL/M, for the 8008 and later the 8080 chips. He started Digital Research, Inc., in Pacific Grove, to market CP/M, which quickly became the operating system of choice in the nascent microcomputer market in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, IBM decided to start its own PC effort and visited the young Bill Gates of Microsoft for an operating system. Gates referred them to Kildall. Kildall was not willing to sign IBM’s nondisclosure agreements. Miffed, IBM went back to Gates and decided to use Gate’s DOS, a quick-and-dirty CP/M knock-off. Kildall was infuriated that Gates would try to copy his software without license, but Gates, flanked by a phalanx of IBM lawyers, forced Kildall to back off. It took Gates another ten years to get the quality of MS-DOS up to the original CP/M system. Many people speculate that if Kildall had been more accommodating toward IBM, he would have closed a deal with IBM and he not Gates would be the industry’s magnate. Kildall was clearly an inventor but not a dedicated businessman; his invention made it into a relatively small market, the first PC users. Gates was not an inventor, but he was an astute businessman; he provided an innovative business model that eventually propelled Microsoft to a 90% market share of all PC operating systems. Kildall was the inventor of PC operating systems, Gates the innovator."

Re:Isn't MS becoming irrelevant?

[RandomMonkey]

Uh, isn't Ubuntu technically Linux? I do agree that Linux was for pros in years gone by, so you had to be extremely proficient (i.e. be able to google and understand) to use it. I do believe that many people over-emphasized the problems though. MS did package things up nicely and get things to work well (through constant bullying and monopoly powers). But like you pointed out now there is Ubuntu. My point is not is MS viable, because it clearly is. It is whether it is relevant or not. With the exception of games, I do not use or need MS for anything (and quite honestly couldn't bear using without Cygwin). And as for the games, that is primarily due to MS's monopoly bullying. I used to be one of those Linux heads that was like, "OMG, when will MS die." But now I am more like, "can I shell into Unix? OK, works for me." It is the relevancy of MS that I am talking about.

Man that sucks....

[Namors]

I'm older than DOS, thanks DOS...thank you for everything

Re:Man that sucks....

[Namors]

finally my tag makes sense, thanks for everything dos

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get off my TRS-80 you whippersnapper!

Geek Mythology

[westlake]

I think that IBM was 'approached' by MS. Gates' mother had contacts through her role as a high ranking official in the United Way. That got Bill a foot in the door and he made good on the opportunity.

The geek has been peddling this story for so long it has become his gospel truth.

This is the history the IBM PC development team saw when it looked at MIcrosoft:

1975 Microcomputer BASIC for the Altair.
1976 Microcomputer BASIC sales to Fortune 500 companies like GE.
1977 Applesoft BASIC, Microsoft BASIC for the PET, TRS-80 and god alone knows how many others.
1977 Microsoft FORTRAN. Microsoft Assembler.
1978 Microsoft COBOL-80
1979 "Microsoft 8080 BASIC is the first microprocessor product to win the ICP Million Dollar [Sales] Award. Traditionally dominated by software for mainframe computers, this recognition is indicative of the growth and acceptance of the PC industry."
1979 MBASIC for the 8086
1980 Z-80 CP/M Softcard for the Apple II.
1980 16 Bit XENIX OS for the 8086 and other platforms.

Microsoft's Timeline

In 1980 Microsoft had 40 employees, revenues of $7.5 million and was clearly positioning itself to move outward from programming tools to applications and operating systems.

When Digital Research dropped the ball, Microsoft promised to deliver a serviceable 16 CP/M clone in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC. In exchange for the non-exclusive license, Microsoft proposed a barn-burning price fot its OS of $50 retail list.

20% of the projected cost of CP/M 86. These were the words IBM wanted to hear.

Re:Geek Mythology

[lennier]

1975 Microcomputer BASIC for the Altair.

I've often wondered what the microcomputer revolution would have been like if someone had written a real language that fitted in 4K ROM rather than TinyBASIC and its clones (including Microsoft BASIC). TinyBASIC was a work of miniaturisation genius, but the BASIC language it was based on was... not. So, so much not. Interpretation, yes. Tokenisation, yes. Line numbers, maybe an acceptable compromise for terminals without screen editors. But BASIC itself was really just a CISC assembly language with a nasty, obfuscated, irregular syntax. It split programming into "toy languages" and "real languages", and then we got the horror that was C++.

What if someone had whipped up a TinyLISP instead?

Re:Geek Mythology

[tehcyder]

I've often wondered what the microcomputer revolution would have been like if someone had written a real language that fitted in 4K ROM rather than TinyBASIC and its clones (including Microsoft BASIC).

Yeah, and why didn't IBM just install Linux in the 4K ROM available in 1975, the useless bastards? Not only is it free as in speech, and about 4 million times more powerful than BASIC it's feee as in beer, so they wuldn't have had to pay teh evil MS a penny!

FreeDOS

[jensend]

In related news, last month FreeDOS turned 17, and in September FreeDOS 1.0 will have been around for 5 years. They're finally gearing up for another release (low manpower and trouble with package management and the installer have hindered attempts to follow the "release early, release often" mantra), and could really use people's help testing and polishing off the 1.1 release.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[hairyfeet]

No reason to be depressed at having experience and I bet when stuff breaks you'd rather have an "old fart" that knows what they are doing than some wet behind the ears green ass kid. You'd be surprised how many setups I've seen borked by having some hot shit kid brought in who goes "buzzword bingo" all over the place instead of having a well thought out plan.

As for TFA DOS was one of those things like WFW 3.11 and the Intel 386 that just wouldn't die. For kiosks DOS with a simple GUI was quite popular for years after DOS left the mainstream just as OS/2 was on ATMs long past IBM giving up and moving on. And why not? For a single tasking application DOS ran fine, used practically no CPU or memory,and was butt simple to code for.

What amazes me is how quickly the general public lost the ability to deal with a command line. DOS was the underpinning for Windows as late as Windows ME in 2000 yet I'd say the vast majority of the population couldn't even tell you what a command line was anymore much less how to launch one in windows. It is like the second solid GUIs came along everyone just erased their collective memories of ever having dealt with a CLI.

So here's to you DOS, you may be long gone now from the public's mind but you are not forgotten and your legacy lives on in DOSBox and FreeDOS which powers many a geek tool such as Spinrite. Even to this day if sat in front of a blanked machine with a DOS prompt I'm sure I'd remember the old "Win9X dump to hard drive" trick and the DOS based speed hacks we'd use to squeeze that last drop out of an old 286/386/486 back in the day. Happy BDay old gal.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[spitzak]

"Driver" is probably misleading. I believe MSDOS called the bios calls, and that by replacing these you could make the file system reside on any disk-like device. There was at least enough API that you could claim different numbers of disks and sizes of the disks and read/write 512-byte blocks on them. Certainly there were implementations on MSDOS 1.0 that talked to the existing home 5 and 10 Mbyte drives such as the apple drive.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[mcavic]

Instead of wipe the CMOS, I should have said "change the BIOS setup", if that makes a difference. It's conceivable to tell the BIOS to change a setting and update the checksum accordingly (depending on which BIOS we're talking about).

Or it could have been a boot sector overwrite instead. I seem to recall the drive had been turned off in the BIOS, but I don't remember going to the trouble of fixing it. I probably would have needed to know the drive geometry anyway.

But that was over 10 years ago.

obliterated IBM at their own game

[nurb432]

Its beacuse IBM didn't think the PC was going to amount to anything, so didn't waste resources to put their good people on it. If they had decent attorneys reviewing things, that contract would never have been signed.

Sad really.

That and they colluded to be sure cp/m was unable to compete due to price.

Re:obliterated IBM at their own game

[Osgeld]

I dont even blame them for CP/M, its a mind fuck and not much else. in the day if you had a DRI you were a rare thing and worthy of getting a reasonable price, you have to keep in mind a simple game of jeopardy was 40-60 bucks, and here these clowns are selling a CP/M work alike for 99$ and its stamped by IBM

standards convergence

[nurb432]

Wile i agree that the eventual standards that came out of it did help the industry overall, i do think that if IBM had not come around we would still have seen a convergence of standards by the 90's, but we still would have choices.

I could see a flicker of this before MS/IBM, just that it didn't have time to happen.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, DOS would call into BIOS interrupts (specifically INT13h) to read/write disk sectors. If you intercepted INT 13h, you could expose a different kind of block storage (e.g. SAN), on top of which DOS could set up and work with FAT as usual.

But DOS itself was monolithic with respect to filesystem support - the code that handled FAT itself was baked into the OS. It was essentially directly under entry points in INT 21h (file open/read/write APIs). It's like Unix, where open/read/write libc calls have the FS implementation hardcoded directly into them, rather than deferring to an extensible FS driver framework. So a DOS filesystem driver would have to hijack that interrupt; this is roughly equivalent to implementing a different FS in our hypothetical Unix by intercepting open/read/write calls (e.g. by inserting your own .so in the search path) - only somewhat more low level.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[flibbajobber]

Because using the extension to determine what a file does was characteristic of MS-DOS. So the "C:\" part of that line isn't the only MS-DOSism present in that line, as Unix-like systems use permissions to determine if a file is executable or not rather than the extension.

IBM PC OS should have just been Forth

[Paul Fernhout]

I worked with someone at IBM who at the time had an IBM Forth, but the PC division just was living in its own world. Forth would have been far more powerful and exapndable and easier to use than DOS.

shitty summary, seriously

[Nyder]

Ya, i'd post it under anonymous also.

IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few of years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools...

Not true.

IBM was looking for an OS, which MS said, we can deliver, then they went and got QDOS and made it into MSDOS, or M-Dos, as it was put above.

In fact, you can find that in a few places:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_DOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft

Now, at the time, MS had made a unix OS, but hadn't even considered (from what i can find) doing a 8086 OS until the chance came with IBM.

Sorry summaries rarely make me want to read the fucking article.

Exactamundo, & it is STILL useful

[Anonymous Coward]

In Windows NT-based OS, for batchfile scripting (can you say "automation" &/or "logon scripts", anyone?).

* It is GOOD TO SEE that you teach it, and that others find it useful, because IF you're going to be a network tech/admin? Batchfiles still rock... even though there's PowerShell!

APK

P.S.=> I am SO very glad I came into personal computers JUST BEFORE "The Windows Craze" (which I love & is great of course), but, on DOS 3.3 thru DOS 6.22, & mainly because of learning the commandline & batch programming (especially how to use % 0-9 errlevels, "vars", + FOR loops mostly)...

... apk

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Sique]

If a program is called "Disk Operating System", you would actually expect the disk read/write access hardwired into it.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Sique]

If you buy a supposedly blank computer without an operating system, it often has DOS 6.22 installed. My <omitted trade mark> for instance came with one.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Sique]

Can't be. I am about 10 years older than vi.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Sique]

I actually had a clone of the Hercules card, with lots lof L*74-circuits on it. I once tried to draw down the logic schema of the card just to understand how it works.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Sique]

Windows NT kernel is strongly designed with VMS in mind, from the people that learned from VMS how to design an operating system.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Sique]

They still could have gone down the path HFS (Apple) and VMS were going and using : as the path separator.

Half-baked at best, wrong at worst...

[Dogtanian]

Your "facts" are a mixture of questionable assertions, questionable conclusions and downright ignorant mistakes.

Its audio was trumped by machines such as the Apple IIgs (16 channel wavetable) and the Atari ST (best MIDI software and capabilities.)

Don't know much about the Apple IIGS' audio, but it sounds interesting (no pun intended) (*)

But the Atari ST? Please. The ST became popular for music because it had MIDI ports built-in. (**) Credit to Atari for their foresight, but nothing that the Amiga couldn't do with a dirt-cheap add-on interface. The sound from an expensive synth attached to an Atari ST sounded better than the Amiga's built-in sound? No shit!

Especially ironic given the Amiga's built-in sound *was* damned impressive for the time (***), whereas the ST's own sound chip was an off-the-shelf 3-channel square-wave job dating back to the 8-bit era that was exceptionally poor in comparison.

Its graphics were again trumped by machines like the Apple IIgs (4096 simultaneous colors.)

You're showing your blatant ignorance here.
The Amiga was well-known for its 4096 colour HAM mode.. Pixel constraints limited its usefulness for animation and games, but it was impressive for static graphics.

The Apple IIGS's graphics look good, but are- as far as I can see- essentially 16-colour (320 x 200) and 4-colour (640 x 200) modes with hardware support for palette switching. The Amiga's copper co-processour could comfortably perform the same trick in its regular (non-HAM) flexible 32-colour (320 x 200) (****) and 4-colour (640 x 200) modes with the same or greater flexibility.

The nintendo had better animation capabilities than the Amiga, and they both came out the same year (1985.)

Are you seriously claiming that the original 8-bit NES was more powerful than the Amiga? Mind you, given your apparent ignorance of the Amiga's 4096 colour graphics capability, I wouldn't put too much store in your judgement on this matter.


(*) If I had time, I'd be interested in how the "wavetable" synthesis performed versus the Amiga's "real" 4-channel, 8-bit sound, but I do admit the Apple II seems like it ought to be impressive by the standards of the time.
(**) And possibly because the ST was more affordable early on, until the Amiga 500 came out and its price fell.

(***) Maybe the Apple IIGS was as well, doesn't mean they weren't both impressive.
(****) Actually, there was a "64-colour" mode, but the second 32 colours were "half-brite" versions of the first 32, so I don't really count that.

Re:Half-baked at best, wrong at worst...

[Rockoon]

Don't know much about the Apple IIGS' audio, but it sounds interesting (no pun intended) (*)

It used the Ensoniq ES5503 DOC chip.

The next generation of this chip (ES5506) was found in the Gravis UltraSound sound card (32-channels) but re-branded the "GF1"

The Amiga's 4 channel (actually 2 channel stereo) just didnt compare to 16 channels. It wasnt even a close contest, as the IIgs sound chip was found in high end synths such as the ESQ-1, SQ-80, and the Mirage.

But the Atari ST? Please. The ST became popular for music because it had MIDI ports built-in. (**) Credit to Atari for their foresight, but nothing that the Amiga couldn't do with a dirt-cheap add-on interface.

With that sort of logic, one could say that the PC had the best graphics because of add-on boards such as TARGA.

The ST had the midi software because the MIDI interface was stock. The ST was the go-to machine for MIDI, not Amiga.

If I had time, I'd be interested in how the "wavetable" synthesis performed versus the Amiga's "real" 4-channel, 8-bit sound

OMG - The Amiga's 4 channels are wavetable. Thats the TERM used for the technology, but I am not surprised that you didn't know that. The IIgs has 16 channel 8-bit "real" [SIC] sound, with the ADDITION that each of the 16 channels was stereo-pannable (the Amiga couldn't even do that..)

Re:Half-baked at best, wrong at worst...

[Dogtanian]

The Amiga's 4 channel (actually 2 channel stereo)

You could use it as two-channel stereo, but it was typically treated as four channel mono.

With that sort of logic, one could say that the PC had the best graphics because of add-on boards such as TARGA.

Not the same at all. My point was that the MIDI *interface* itself was basically a couple of generic DIN sockets and some interfacing components- hardly comparable to what would have then been a massively expensive high-end graphics card.

The interface wasn't a major technological feat in itself (which is why one could pick up an Amiga MIDI interface add-on relatively cheaply). What was more relevant was the fact they were already included in an affordable 16-bit computer able to run (relatively) powerful software. The ST's affordability versus the early Amiga probably helped it too (and given that the Amiga's somewhat more impressive onboard hardware wasn't a big deal if MIDI was your primary interest- unlike, say, graphics or games- there was probably no big reason for the market to switch later).

The ST had the midi software because the MIDI interface was stock.

Absolutely. As I said, that was a smart move by Atari, just not one that was technologically that big a deal in itself. And its internal sound *was* undeniably pitiful- I know because I owned one of the things before I happily replaced it with an Amiga. :-)

OMG - The Amiga's 4 channels are wavetable. Thats the TERM used for the technology, but I am not surprised that you didn't know that.

If you want to be pedantic, this article suggests that "wavetable synthesis" is quite distinct from straight sample-based sound.

I might not have been technically correct, but I wasn't the one being pedantic. If *you* want to be pedantic and insist on precise and correct meanings, I'll happily nitpick any mistakes though. (^_^)

At any rate, if the Apple IIGS was capable of playing any samples on 16 or 32 channels (rather than being restricted in what waveforms it can play back and what it can do with them), then I'll happily agree that it ought to be better than the Amiga in that area. But I would certainly want to double-check any "facts" that you presented from a more reputable source before committing to that opinion!

BTW, are you still claiming that the NES is more powerful than the Amiga? :-)

Re:Half-baked at best, wrong at worst...

[Rockoon]

You could use it as two-channel stereo, but it was typically treated as four channel mono.

2 unpannable left channels, and 2 unpannable right channels.

Do you see the limitation of this vs 16 pannable channels?

Here is something from the IIgs demo scene

As indicated in some of the text that appears on screen, they are using 13 samples on 10 channels (at 2:15 into the video). Note that the power bars arent simply triggered.. thats the actual amplitude of each audio sample as its being played as well. Thats what the IIgs was doing while the Amiga was flailing around with 4 channels.

Re:Half-baked at best, wrong at worst...

[Dogtanian]

2 unpannable left channels, and 2 unpannable right channels. Do you see the limitation of this vs 16 pannable channels?

I wasn't claiming that it was as good as the supposed Apple II spec. I was claiming that the Amiga was basically a 4 (mono) channel machine.

As indicated in some of the text that appears on screen, they are using 13 samples on 10 channels (at 2:15 into the video). Note that the power bars arent simply triggered.. thats the actual amplitude of each audio sample as its being played as well. Thats what the IIgs was doing while the Amiga was flailing around with 4 channels.

What, you think I wouldn't believe you without the bouncy bars to "prove" that it had 10 channels? Relax- I believe you(!) In all honesty though, that's a very dry and relatively uninteresting demo that smacks of wanting to "prove" technical superiority rather than let it demonstrate itself.

Maybe I'm suffering from heightened expectations (and also having to judge it with my spoiled 2011 ears rather than the square-wave era 80s ears that first heard the Amiga), but I didn't find the audio in the demo that impressive. Perhaps it was the demo cliche techno-influenced track that didn't really show the chip off, but I'd have been expected the difference between 4 and 10 or 16 channels to sound more significant. I suspect the chip's strengths might be better demonstrated by less minimalist, more layered-type material? I wouldn't judge the soundchip solely by one demo (that one or otherwise), but that *was* the one you chose.

You talk about "flailing around" (with derogatory implication) but listening to Amiga demos 20 years on, I'm still impressed with the quality of some tracker modules when I remember they were done in 4 channels. Everything else equal, of course 16 channels would be better, but flailing? Nope.

As for the graphics, not remotely impressed considering you claimed the Apple IIGS's graphics "trumped" the Amiga. Frankly, the wireframes wouldn't be interesting on the ST, let alone the Amiga, and the rudimentary filled 3D objects weren't impressive either.

But nice-looking sound chip, definitely.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[DocHoncho]

You're not the only one. I routinely get frusteratted when I try to type ls into a co-worker's pc that doesn't have my alias set. I wwent a few steps further and set aliases for rm, cp, mv and all the rest. Not by choice mind you, damned Windows Shop. At least I convinced my boss NOT to make me use ASP.NET, opting instead for Python and Django.

Oh, and said boss thinks VB (ala classic ASP) is just neato-keen and keeps making ignorant remarks about how he could whip up some planned application in VB in a couple of hours. Good lord, I've seen the abominations he's wreaked. It's enough to drive a man to drink.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[djlowe]

C:\OFFLAWN.COM

Hi,

Speaking as an "old fart", I can say that, while this is funny, you obviously aren't an old-school DOS user.

If you were typing that from a DOS prompt on an old PC, you'd enter it as:

\offlawn

Few people had more than one hard drive back then, so your default drive would be C:, eliminating the need to specify the drive letter. Then, you'd leverage DOS' internal processing of commands: It would look for internal commands first, then look for external commands. When extensions weren't specified, it would look for executables as follows: COM first, then EXE and then BAT.

Since OFFLAWN.COM apparently exists in your example, you'd save typing another four characters just by knowing this.

Now, with regards to the location of OFFLAWN.COM? Nobody I knew would ever fill up the root of C: with files - there was a limit to the number of files and directories that could exist in the root, after all, and if you reached it, you'd get an out of space error once you tried to create another.

In addition, given the fact that a standard DOS screen was 80 by 25, you'd want to limit a DIR display, so as to avoid having to pipe the output (later, use /P to page it).

The approach that I used was this: The root of C: was limited to COMMAND.COM, AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, the hidden system files, and subdirectories (what you young folk call "folders" these days) in which you'd store programs and data.

Since there were also limitations on the length of the path, I'd make the names of subdirectories that I wanted included in it short, too.

My usual approach ended up in a path similar to this:

C:\BAT;C:\BIN;C:\DOS;

BAT contained my batch files. BIN contained DOS utilities that enhanced or replaced similar DOS commands and DOS contained DOS, of course.

Doing this kept the path small, reduced the time to search it, and also ensured that DOS would search for executables the way that *I* wanted it to.

I wrote BAT files to start all of my programs, you see, and so putting them all in C:\BAT would ensure that they would be found and run first. Most were simple: Change to the directory where the program was installed, run it, and then return to the root of C: once it exited.

Since this path leveraged the way DOS processed commands running WordStar from a command line was as easy as typing ws from anywhere and pressing enter, without having to actually have the directory where WS.COM resided in the path, nor having to be in a specific subdirectory in order to avoid the dreaded "Bad command or filename".

Finally, given the organization I just explained, OFFLAWN.COM would be in C:\BIN, and so, all you'd need to do to run it would be type: offlawn (DOS converted all input to uppercase, after all, so why waste time pressing the Shift key?).

And so I close by saying this:

offlawn

*grin*

Regards,

dj

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[djlowe]

Hi,

It was easier with the later Western Digital 8-bit controllers that the young whippersnappers had, with the built in text/graphical low-level formatting menu.

g=c800:5 FTW *grin*

Sorry, but that was one of the BEST things that ever happened to PC's back then.

Having a built-in, standard way to low-level format a hard drive and then enter the bad track map? Forget about it :) Calling it "graphical" is quite a stretch, though. I can't even begin to count the number of times that I had to restart it because I made a mistake...

Regards,

dj

WRONG DATE

[Anonymous Coward]

MS-DOS was not "born" when Microsoft bought QDOS.
It was born when it first went on sale to the public.
What date was MS-DOS first publicly available? I guess its the same day the IBM PC went on sale.
Are we going to have another 30th birthday then?

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[djlowe]

Hi,

So here's to you DOS, you may be long gone now from the public's mind but you are not forgotten

Amen, Brother!

many a geek tool such as Spinrite

I still have all of my old Spinrite diskettes... and fondly recall replacing my 8-bit WD MFM HD controller with a brand-spanking new Adaptec 8-bit RLL controller... and then low-level formatting my ST-225 HD with it. No way to know where the bad tracks would be, due to the encoding change... so I left it blank, FDISK'd it, formatted it,installed DOS, and then beat the crap out of it over a weekend with Spinrite (v1.0? 1.1?) and let it figure it out.

Once done, I reinstalled my programs and restored my data... and had the equivalent of an ST-238 :)

And, one final comment for DOS command line junkies: 4DOS! It, and its successors, have remained on my small list of "must have" programs: I've had licenses for JP Software's products since 1990. Bought licenses for 4DOS, 4OS/2, 4NT, and now Take Command... they just keep getting better. Fast, rock-solid, amazing feature set... they've made the DOS and Windows command line better, more useful, "forever" it seems, for me at least.

Regards,

dj

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

One of those characters is blank in the standard USA ASCII character set. You could use that one to insert what looks like a space in your filename, and confuse the hell out of anyone trying to access it from a prompt. "How the hell did he get a space there? And why does DOS keep telling me the file doesn't exist when I try to view it?

Well, don't leave us hanging, Dude - what is it?!? Oh, that's right, it's just something that any nerd learned back in the days when DOS was king... and which most of us figured out by ourselves, back then.

I discovered it by looking at the ASCII character tables that IBM included in their PC manuals back in the 80's... and knowing that I could enter them using Alt and entering their numeric value via the number pad, the implications were obvious, back before there was an Internet to Google that would make us think that we were nerds.

Did you have a point in posting this?

I've been looking over your posting history, and it appears that you'd be better off posting on computer gaming sites: That appears to be your forte, after all.

Your comment about there being no such thing as an 18-bit CPU, because CPU's have to be "powers of 2", was particularly telling: It's ignorance, backed by knowledge gleaned whose meaning is beyond your understanding, cemented with the certainty that comes from true cluelessness and the arrogance that results.

My advice to you is this: If you want to become a nerd, spend less time playing games that others have created and spend more time playing with the computers, operating systems, upon which they run.

Irrelevant comparison

[Paul1969]

In some systems of reckoning, a generation is said to be 30 years (although mostly shorter in biological terms).
So, are we ready for the second generation of MS-DOS?

(Please be neat and only puke in the designated barf bags.)

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[CSMoran]

Sure, but DOS let you drop the extension when executing the file. It first looked for a matching .COM, then .EXE, then .BAT.

AC Accounts

[nukenerd]

Relayman wrote :- Sorry, I'm not responding to AC any more. It's not that hard to set up an account with a handle.

Surely it should depend on the nature of the AC post.

Does it occur to you that someone might post as AC because they are giving some inside information (like from within a company) but do not want to be identified by their boss or someone else who might recognise them from their handle? I have done this a few times myself. Posters also might want to remain AC for the more frank and open posts when discussions of girlfriends (or lack of) are involved, as happens on /. occasionally.

Yes I know someone might be able to find out if they persisted enough (tracing network activity within your company network for example) but mostly they would not be bothered.

It's the extreme

[Quila]

That he took a decent idea to such an extreme was my problem. Let's say you have a function to converte torque to horsepower

#define HP_CALC(torque, enginespeed) (torque * enginespeed / 5252)

That's a constant in a known equation, and you'd use it only once ever in your program. But he'd still want us to define the constant HP_CONVERSION_FACTOR(5252) and use that in the equation.

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[hairyfeet]

The funny part is if anything I find Spinrite even MORE useful now than under the days of the DOS, thanks to how shitty Seagate drives have gotten. You'd be surprised how many times I've had to use Spinrite 6 to "fix" a Seagate drive long enough to get the data off. When I heard that Samsung was selling out I wanted to cry, they and Hitachi were the "go to" sources for drives of late as Seagate has turned into shite on a crusty roll. If you spot one snatch yourself a Samsung EcoDrive as I have the 1Tb model and at 5900 RPM stomps the dogshit out of the Seagate 7200RPM it replaced. really top notch gear.

But its nice to see someone still remembers the old days of DOS hacking. I can still recall all the basic DOS commands in my sleep, as well as the old "Copy win9X in DOS and install from the drive" trick. You really could do some cool tricks in DOS back then thanks to having low level access. Now the closest I get to that is the fun of unlocking cores on AMD boxes, but frankly with Tigerdirect selling quads for $199 there ain't really a point in doing that anymore either. Hell at prices that cheap i'm building one just as a spare for my dad so when he or one of his friends bork their PC they can just use the spare quad while I fix their box.

So here is to DOS, to 486s, to hardware hacking, and all the other tricks these kids will never know or understand. Frankly it blows my mind that I can buy monster quads for less than the cost of my first HDD, which was a grand total of 5Mb and was heavy enough you could kill someone by dropping it on their head. Remember the old Bigfoot drives? Damn that bitch was heavy! The hilarious part is my very first "gamer" PC is still running 5 days a week as a C&C controller for a lathe at a lumber place. It was a whopping 60MHz 486 with a 200Mb HDD and a Voodoo I. damned thing still runs DOS 3 and does its job cranking out custom columns 5 days a week using a huge ass ISA card. They just don't build 'em like that anymore!

Re:Cue a gazillion posts...

[smash]

Yup, but very very few games or applications made use of it. Why, i've got no idea. I think maybe only some CGAs supported it perhaps? Undocumented programming hack? If you could have used that mode for everything i'm not sure why you wouldn't...