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DOS 5 Upgrade Video
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Sep 12, 2007 09:33 AM
from the god-i-love-this dept.
from the god-i-love-this dept.
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".
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DOS 5 Upgrade Video
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Hey, DOS 5 was cool (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hey, DOS 5 was cool (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.llabmik.net/ | Last Journal: Monday March 21 2005, @04:31PM)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS#Legal_issues [wikipedia.org]
The marketing geniuses... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The marketing geniuses... (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
After replacing it, I couldn't find her XP disk, so I just installed Ubuntu on it.
Her first response on logging in?
Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Brown is the kiss of DEATH (Score:4, Funny)
Forget Vista! (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday November 07, @10:09AM)
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! (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://home.swbell.net/kingtj | Last Journal: Saturday September 30 2006, @01:07PM)
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. (Score:4, Funny)
Back when people could actually code.. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.phpgd.com/)
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.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Back when people could actually code.. (Score:5, Funny)
Hey. HEY! Where d'ya think you're going? (muttermutter) Spoiled brat...
Re:Back when people could actually code.. (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
Re:Back when people could actually code.. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
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.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.. (Score:4, Funny)
(http://honeypot.net/ | Last Journal: Friday April 07 2006, @09:33AM)
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... (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.roboguys.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 19 2006, @01:15AM)
Still going strong... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Wednesday April 25 2007, @08:46AM)
Taco (Score:3, Funny)
Nah, too easy.
A couple of things (Score:4, Funny)
Tough love indeed. (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday June 05 2006, @10:46AM)
Oh great, I can still hear it, but now I can't find the close window button. You bastard!
Re:5 minutes? On TV? (Score:4, Informative)
oww.. my eyes.... my eyes.... (Score:4, Funny)
Just remember (Score:4, Insightful)
"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 (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.slipstreams.net/)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Could be worse... (Score:3, Informative)
(http://127.0.0.1/)
Pretty much everyone I know went from 3.x right to 5.
Getting out of hand (Score:3, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday October 15, @07:06PM)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday July 12 2004, @09:38PM)
HA!
You would never work again...
RS
(sigh) (Score:3, Funny)
(http://web-owls.com/)
I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned Gorillas (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.conversal.co.uk/)
MSDOS 5 (Score:3, Funny)
(http://jwsmythe.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday September 08, @03:38PM)
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... (Score:3, Funny)
RTFM, Bob.
Please! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://guerillartivism.net/ | Last Journal: Monday July 11 2005, @05:48PM)
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.demaagd.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 27 2002, @06:53PM)
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
Being the founder/creator of something makes the term "his site" appropriate.
Re:News? (Score:5, Funny)
Your loss is my gain dude!
Re:News? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:News? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday January 18 2006, @06:02PM)
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? (Score:5, Funny)