MS DOS: A Eulogy

roadhog95 writes: "Love it or hate it, I'm sure everyone's got a love story or traumatic memory of the infamous MS-DOS. Byte magazine reports on the passing away of DOS in light of the recent Windows XP launch. Even Regis Philben stopped by to pay tribute: 'Bill... Is that your final command prompt?'"

Sad to see DOS go

[MrBlack]

While it was around I could always use this joke..."I know DOS backwards...it's SOD". I guess I'll need to find/think up/steal some more material.

Re:GONE?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you ever post the word osen again, you'll be sorry!

Hilarious: EMM386 stop error

[Otis_INF]

What I always found funny was that when a certain DOS program went bezerk, EMM386 thought to jump in and save your ass with... that's right, shutting down the computer before you could save _ANYTHING_, showing words similar to:

"EMM386 has shutdown your computer to prevent loss of data".

Thankfully these days are over... o wait, nv_disp.dll just went into a stop 0xea

No more 16-bit DOS code... again?

[ksp]

[Bil Gates] stated, "It's the end of the MS-DOS era," referring to the exorcism of 16-bit code from the Windows code base.

What, again??

Re:Fond .bat memories

[guusbosman]

Oh yes -- those could old times :) I was first called a 'hacker' when I found out how to break into somebody's password protected filemanager (simple hitting Ctrl-C inside the menu-shell was enough) :))

Re:Sad to see DOS go

[Alrocket]

Please insert sense of humour into drive a:
(L)augh, (R)etry, (F)ail.

I guess we will never know...

[cobyrne]

I guess this means we will now never know the correct answer to -

Error reading drive A:
Abort, Retry, Ignore?

DOS Software

[cr@ckwhore]

Here's my reality... and I'm not kidding about this, but feel free to mod up to "funny".

I work for a software company, maintaining 15 year old DOS Software. The company is owned by older people that can't move fast enough to be in this industry... but somehow, we're still managing to sell this software to unsuspecting people.

We have 2 applications... both of which are touted as "high-end", mission critical apps. A typical installation could cost the client somewhere around $50,000 USD, sometimes more. Here's what they get:

1. A nasty DOS app written in Qbasic, using a Btrieve database on a Novell Server, all running over our favorite protocol, IPX.

Sounds good? Well, its my nightmare!!!

When win2k was released, a lot of little things in our DOS app stopped working. Our company's president refused to believe that MS-DOS was anything less than cutting edge. Now that XP was released, and more things are broken, our company's president refuses to believe that microsoft would abandon DOS.

Anyway, enough rambling about this. Its a sad fact that there are companies STILL working with DOS programs. Sad. Even worse, is that I'm typing here, rather than working on that Qbasic crap.

c:\> del *.*

Re:Fond .bat memories

[david duncan scott]

Edlin wished it had the intuitiveness and user friendliness of writing in your own blood using the stump of your foot for a pen.

DOS lives on at IBM

[jalefkowit]

The venerable MS-DOS is dead... but its kissing cousin PC-DOS [ibm.com] lives on at IBM [ibm.com]. Yes, Big Blue will happily sell you PC-DOS 2000 [ibm.com] for the low, low price of only $62 ($50 if you want the download-only version).

I can understand why they offer it -- there's probably still a few places where legacy DOS apps are in place, and IBM has a long history of never ever backing away from a technology it's made a "strategic commitment" to. Still, it's funny to click on the "System requirements" link and see "Intel 8088/8086, 512K RAM, 6-18MB hard disk space". Kinda takes ya back, doesn't it? (snif)

-- Jason Lefkowitz

Pulling the plug on old DOS

[MetalHead666]

When they finally decided to pull the plug, DOS is rumoured to have responded:

"Keyboard error, press F1 to resume."

Re:No more 16-bit DOS code... again?

[zerocool^]

windows 95:

A 32-bit extention to
a 16-bit graphical interface running on
an 8-bit command line coded for
a 4-bit microprocessor by
a 2-bit company.

~z

The truth about windoze

[DEATH AND HATRED]

Windoze98 is just a 32 bit extension of a 16 shell designed for an 8 bit o/s written for a 4 bit procceser by a 2 bit company that cant stand 1 bit of competition!

Microsoft Bob.

[saintlupus]

I don't see any mention of that revolutionary MS Bob system that was going to make life worth living. Am i the only one who remembers when Egghead had stores, this was a featured software of hte week thingie in one of their fliers. I remember saying to the wife, that it was a stinker. I think the assistant was Bill himself if I remember correctly.

When a friend of mine was working at Computer City, they had the launch party for Microsoft Bob. The store had preordered something along the lines of 7 thousand copies to meet the anticipated demand. They sold four.

Not four thousand. Four.

And then they were all returned within a week.

(Adding insult to injury, the mylar balloons with the Bob logo were floating around the barnlike interior of the store and setting off the security alarms for weeks.)

Truly a stellar product, eh?

--saint

In the Beginning...

[Webmoth]

...there was QDOS. This stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating system."

Then, Microsoft bought it, got rid of the "Quick" and kept the "Dirty."

That left us with MS-DOS.

Re:Remembering DOS

[jiheison]

Until you've got to delete a few thousand, when DEL *.OBJ starts to look pretty sweet.

I don't know. After all these years, I am still mesmerized by that animated file flying from the Folder to the Recycle Bin. It's well worth the several minutes it takes to appear if you have seveal thousand files to discard. It is also quite helpful to to see the file names flash by at about 100 per second. All in all, well worth the extra time and memory required to process.

Moral: Windows can trash your filesystem so hard and so deep not even DOS can save you. Before windows, CHKDSK/F did just dandy

The only time I have had to re-install Win98 was when Scandisk found a problem and then offered to "fix" it.

MS takes command line away after apple introduces.

[dork_vomit]

This is kinda funny... Just as apple introduces the unix command into its products for the first time ever, Microsoft seems to think it is a good time to end it. Well more than 80,000 apple users spent $30.00 on the OS X beta but there are still Windows people who use a four year old OS because everything new that MS puts out if crap.

Re:MacOS's vastly inferior and triumphant rival

[man_ls]

History is written by the winners. Not by the losers. Because of this, there are always three sides to a story. The winner's side, the loser's side, and the truth. It's not possible to know all 3 at any given time.