DOS 5 Upgrade Video

Every now and then I stumble on something so ridiculous that I have to share it. This is a promotion video to upgrade to DOS 5 obviously made in a different era. Promoting features like mouse support, a graphical shell, and freeing up at LEAST 45k of memory, well, Gimme 5! Did I mention that it's all set to a hip beat? You'll love it. And by "Love" I mean "Stick forks in your eyes".

Hey, DOS 5 was cool

Much better than 4. And the memory management did help. I remember with the help of QEMM I was able to get something like 633K free, which was incredible.

Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool

Best DOS ever was DOS 6.20. However that contained the pirated Stak data compression software, which is why DOS 6.22 was released - to replace the better compression of 6.20 with the sucky MS-made compression in 6.22. (DOS 6.21 was like Windows XP N - Same as DOS 6.20 but with NO compression)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS#Legal_issues [wikipedia.org]

The marketing geniuses...

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

Re:The marketing geniuses...

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

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

Brown is the kiss of DEATH

My wife's laptop drive died recently.

After replacing it, I couldn't find her XP disk, so I just installed Ubuntu on it.

Her first response on logging in?

"This is crap, it's brown."

Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH

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

Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH

All this talk of women. You know this is slashdot, not dos 5 fan fiction.

Forget Vista!

Can I downgrade to DOS 5 instead? Why, the productivity gains alone would be worth it! And I suspect it's not nearly as bloated as Vista.

Re:Forget Vista!

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

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

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

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

(We actually did managed to fix his printer, by buying another broken one off eBay that had a different issue. His just had a dead power supply board in it.)

The Windows 386 Promo Video is better.

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

Back when people could actually code..

Coders today are right lazy bastards. 45kb was a lot. You had to think about organising things properly. Today I write code in languages (PHP mostly, some Perl) that hide all manner of management away from you. I'm certain that someone of my Dad's generation who wrote software in the olden days (1960s/70s/80s) would have a fit at some of the stuff I get away with.

We shouldn't laugh at the idea of freeing up 45k, we should thank our lucky stars it's no longer something we have to care about. We have it easy.

Re:Back when people could actually code..

I know it, back in my day we coded by punching holes in little cards! In the snow! And we loved it!

Re:Back when people could actually code..

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

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

Re:Back when people could actually code..

I agree, especially if these are (like I believe it to be) 45K freed of conventional memory [wikipedia.org]. I remember the times and can assure you 45K freed wasn't to be laughed at, but a real benefit. DOS users were often trying to cram in as much as they could in conventional RAM at one point, and 45K could be the difference of one more TSR process [wikipedia.org] or not. Ah, the memories... And later joys of Quarterdeck and their QEMM [wikipedia.org], and so on.

Re:Back when people could actually code..

They also sacrificed a whole lot to get those 45kb. Forget using lots of generic objects, instead you custom code almost everything. Make all sorts of nasty shortcuts and hardcoded structures that make expandability a mess. You may have heard of the "y2k" problem which was only one of many symptoms. Time was wasted not improving the software, but making small optimizations.

Today you have tons of prefabricated libraries and code. Creating, organizing and assembling those to quickly and effectively make complex, stable, expandible, feature-rich, user-friendly applications using a minimum of time and money is a very real skill - even if it's not that same skill. I think your dad's generation would be rather shocked by the requirements of what you should do in a 6 month project.

Re:Back when people could actually code..

Doesn't stop at users. I'm honestly baffled every time when I have a talk with a few programmers here and realize how precious little they know of the machine they're working with. Yes, they're coding in C#, some in Perl, but be honest, was there a single programmer in your time that didn't know that a "stack" is not only the pile of documents he didn't read on his table? And why a stack overflow is not only a nuisance but a danger to system integrity? Especially in a von Neumann architecture (which earns you another blank stare)?

I think that's at the very least as scary as the illiteracy we see today in users. Programmers aren't much behind in cluelessness. They have their handful of tools, and they can apply them. They know a few algos and they punch them in. Why? No idea. How they work? No idea.

Re:Back when people could actually code..

I'm certain that someone of my Dad's generation who wrote software in the olden days (1960s/70s/80s)

I'm not that old, son. And your mother and I were wondering if you'd given any more thought to finding your own place.

I love the fact that...

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

Still going strong...

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

command /c ver

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

CollegeHumor link is almost Slashdotted

so here's the Youtube [youtube.com] version.

Taco

"Every now and then I stumble on something so ridiculous that I have to share it."

Nah, too easy.

A couple of things

1. I'm sure the little animation of the hammer smashing the computer has actually played out in millions of households since the release of that video. 2. Those girls are probably still asking, "Would you like fries with that?" to this day.

Tough love indeed.

And by "Love" I mean "Stick forks in your eyes".

Oh great, I can still hear it, but now I can't find the close window button. You bastard!

Re:5 minutes? On TV?

If you can stand listening through to the finish, somewhere near the end they talk about selling this upgrade with new systems, and how every system purchaser will want one, like "do you want fries with that?" So this was obviously targeted at sales reps the dealer channel. I used to work in computer sales right about the time of this video, and we always received tons of stupid sales promo videos like this.

oww.. my eyes.... my eyes....

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

Just remember

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

"4 GB of memory, lol, amazing they could do anything with that!! Coders must have been gods back then to get any performance out of those machines. I miss those days! Sigh...."

Freeing up 45K

Back in the days of DOS 5 and 6, freeing up this much memory really was a big deal. I was trying to run some BBS software at one point (I want to say Renegade, however its been a very, very long time). The program refused to run without something like over 500K of conventional memory available, maybe more, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do to get it available.

After lots of research, I found an advanced book that talked about a small 'bug' in MS-DOS' EMM386.EXE extended memory manager. EMM386 had a flag that let you include specific blocks of memory to include. For some reason, if you tacked on the A000 memory range, rather then adding this block into extended memory, it would tack it onto the end of conventional memory. Even better, any available sequential block after A000 could also be included, and it would get added as conventional memory as well as long as it was not in use.

This was hit or miss, as some systems part of the AXXX memory range was being used by the actual video card. However, IIRC more advanced video cards didn't touch this portion of memory any more. The result? Adding something like the following to config.sys:

DEVICE=C:\Windows\EMM386.SYS I=A000-AFFFF

Tacked on quite a bit of extra conventional memory. There was nothing like running the command to show memory usage (and its been too long, I don't even remember what this was at this point) and seeing >750K of conventional memory available and being used.

Ahh, memories...

Re:Freeing up 45K

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

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

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

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

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

Memories

Ahh, the memories. The horrible, horrible memories. Excuse me while I crawl under my desk, rock back and forth and weep softly.

Could be worse...

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

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

Getting out of hand

I've written a blog that will surely make the front page of Slashdot. It is titled:

Top ten list of things that Ron Paul said about Apple products while typing on a Linux computer at an Anti-Iraq war conference.

The reason I don't read Digg often is that I want real, biased, geeky, obscure fact riddled news commented on by opinionated sysadmins!

poor bastard

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

HA!

You would never work again...

RS

(sigh)

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

I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas

MS-DOS 5 must have been the last time that Microsoft included a programming language with an operating system, dear old QBasic. Actually, it was in MS-DOS 6 and 7, and by definition Win95 and was what ran when you typed 'edit' at the command line. Still, how many hours were wasted throwing exploding bananas at gorillas on skyscrapers? I was so much simpler then.

MSDOS 5

That was just cruel. Cruel to the poor schmucks who were in the videos. Cruel to us who watched even a small part of it.. I can feel my brain bleeding...

    Lets hope that isn't the song that's going to get stuck in my head for the rest of the day..

    (Gimme 5, whoo, gimme 5, whooo)

    Oh god.

Dude in the tie...

Why is Bob Saget in DOS training?

RTFM, Bob.

Please!

Kill me! Now! ahhhh! my eyes!

Re:News?

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

Re:News?

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

Re:News?

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

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

Re:News?

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

Your loss is my gain dude!

Re:News?

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

Re:News?

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

Re:News?

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

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

Re:News?

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