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?'"

Fond .bat memories

[Kasmiur]

I remember when I was younger I used a .bat file to create a simple menu system for my brothers to be able to play the games they wanted to play. It even had simple graphics from the wonderful echo command.

GONE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use it for some things, like when im doing some chip programing. No i'm note an old fart that sticks only with dos, I run several osen
linux windowze beos they all have something good about them.

Re:Links my Man, Linkz...

[CmdrPaco]

They are both at their respective .org
FreeDOS [freedos.org]
DOSEmu [dosemu.org]
There is a lot of info on the net too, just google it.

DOS is Alive! FreeDos.....

[Quazion]

here @ freedos.org [freedos.org]

I have used it for formating and fdisking fat16
and fat32 filesystems, or to remove linux
partitions without a linux bootflop or bootcd.

And i know people using DOS for there daily
programming, creation of Embedded Systems and
ofcourse webbrowsing and chatting....

Quazion.

DOS was "closer" to CP/M Than most realize

[NZheretic]

From "Microsoft the Company"
http://www.aaxnet.com/topics/msinc.html

* 1982 - Digital Research sues Microsoft and IBM - Wins - . It was obvious MS-DOS and its PC-DOS variant were simply rip- offs of Digital Research's CP/M operating system. It remained only to prove it contained DR code. DR's Gary Kildall sat down at an IBM PC supplied by IBM and, using a secret code, got it to pop up a Digital Research copyright notice.

It's case won, Digital Research received monetary compensation and the right to clone MS-DOS. This is why Microsoft never sued DR over DR-DOS, but used every other means to destroy it. The settlement was under a strict non- disclosure agreement, so few even know DR sued, never mind that they won.

Digital Research was purchased by Novel and destroyed by neglect and mismanagement. The products now belong to Caldera, which has filed suit against Microsoft over predatory practices used to destroy DR-DOS's market.

Re:It's funny...

[Foxman98]

Ummmmm?

Start->Programs->Accesories->Command Prompt

Or

Start->Run->cmd.exe

Seems like it's there to me. But who knows. It might all be a figment of of my imagination.

er... dead? since when?

[the endless]

In announcing MS-DOS's demise, Microsoft founder Bill Gates typed "exit" at the MS-DOS command line during the launch of Windows XP.

A prize to the person who provides an explanation for how Billy Boy typed "exit" at a command line that doesn't exist?

I haven't had a chance to get at an WinXP machine to check, but the command line must still be there. There's too many reasons that it's necessary, e.g. SQL Server has loads of command-line utilities. Just because MS have taken it off the start menu doesn't mean that it can't be accessed by someone with half a brain.

Not only does XP have the command prompt

[ch-chuck]

it still has 'edlin' -- whoohoo!

Re:So I guess XP finally gets to Mac OS7 level

[gazbo]

bash != linux
bsh != unix
cmd != dos

The death of DOS does not mean the death of the Microsoft CLI.

What's in a name: DOS

[ajs]

The water is getting muddy, here, so let me explain for those who are lost in the buzzword-bingo:

First there was DOS (well, not really, but that's where my story begins). DOS was not really an OS so much as a very simple library and some interupt handlers. The command-prompt was a program that came with it, and a very important one (so were "dir", "del" and others).

When MS decided to build a graphical interface, they did so on top of DOS. DOS was still there as the core interupt handler, but Windows was how the user interacted with the system.

This posed some problems. Windows was not a multi-tasking OS because DOS was not. Windows faked it by giving applications library routines that let them manage their own time-slices in a cooperative multitasking framework. Any app that wanted to take over the system simply avoided calling those routines, but that would be considered bad form.

Eventually, MS build may kludges into Windows to allow memory protection and something resembling premptive multi-tasking. These are good things, but 95, 98 and ME are all still DOS-based.

With NT (2000 and XP are NT versions) MS wrote the whole OS from scratch and did a fairly good job at the low levels (yes, NT is a nice OS down near the hardware where you never interact with it). At the higher levels, they just took the miserable waste of system resources called Win32 (MS' port of Windows to a 32-bit environment) and pasted it on top of NT. Win32 has grown and become more NT-friendly over the years, but it's still the vestige of a DOS-based windowing environment on top of what is arguably a fine OS.

Woefully, the dream that MS engineers had of creating a flexible mircrokernel platform was also squashed. NT was supposed to have several smaller sub-systems to support many types of application access (the POSIX subsystem is a demonstration of the dismal failure of that plan). In reality, all NT, 2000 and XP apps have to go through Win32 to be useful, and Win32 is what most folks think of when they think Microsoft OS.

In the end, the recent press about DOS disapearing is actually misleading. DOS may be gone from NT, 2000 and XP, but the legacy of Windows remains, and will continue to taint MS products for a very long time.

DOS will never die.

[walnut]

MS DOS may now have gone away, but in the land of PC-104s TinyLinux and RomDOS will continue to have practical applications. Any system that needs to continually chug along, fit into a peanut sized Flash ROM and otherwise work happily ever after will have a need. MS may be out of the market, but who cares? :)

Re:What's in a name: DOS

[jyoull]

"dir" and "del" and several other things were not programs that "came with" DOS, but were internal functions of the command interpreter. Some other internal functions included "type", "echo" and "cls". External programs included with DOS covered the more "complex" operations, for example, "format", "fdisk" and of course, "mode"

Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit...

[ethereal]

/usr/local is for stuff that didn't come with the standard install. /share is actually useful, believe it or not, although I'm not sure where other OSen put user-shared files like that. It's better than /etc, at least. /opt is an abomination and must die, I agree.

Responding to the parent post: there's a reason for those different /bin directories: /sbin is for statically linked binaries in case your system is really hosed, /bin is for when you don't have /usr mounted, and /usr/bin is for everything else.

In practice, distributions may not be setting things up quite this way, but IMHO they should. If you're putting everything on just one filesystem, then most of these don't matter, except for /sbin.

And in case I forgot to mention it, /opt must die. Especially annoying are RPMs that are non-relocatable so that you can't change the install prefix away from that damn /opt. It's a huge pain if you are striving to have the smallest possible root filesystem and then @$%! KDE dumps tons of stuff in /opt. Yes, it's really the RPM makers' fault. No, it still bugs the heck out of me.

MS-DOS doesn't deserve a fond remembrance

[Junks Jerzey]

This is a classic example of how nostalgia can be stronger than history. MS-DOS was terrible, so terrible, in many ways. It has nothing to do with the 16-bitness of it, or even driver memory crunch hell, but simply that the command prompt side of it was an embarrassment from day one.

It took over ten years before there was any kind of command history (with doskey, you could finally hit the up arrow to recall previous commands). There wasn't a real alias mechanism until doskey either. And heck--and everyone forgets this--you couldn't even properly edit the command line until doskey came along. File completion was never standard. The batch file commands were braindead and severely limited.

Sure, some third parties walked in with their own top notch command processors--most notably JP Software with 4DOS, which is still better than every UNIX shell I've ever used--but even with over a decade to work on it, the largest PC software company in the world couldn't manage to write decent command processor given years to do so. And the worst part is that it was so easy it could have been a high school project. Dr. Dobb's Journal even published the source code for a bash-like shell that replaced command.com.

I think the likely answer here is that Microsoft could have written something better, but they spent a decade trying to beat down MS-DOS and replace it with something else. Remember, Windows 1.0 shipped in 1985. So for all that time, MS-DOS users were stuck with an intentionally inferior product. It's difficult to forget the pain of those days.

NT Started at NT 3.1

[alexhmit01]

Come on, don't you remember all the OS/2 vs. NT 3.1 articles when NT 3.1 shipped? NT 3.1 was a flop, mostly used as a testing ground for people interested in keeping up with MS's new plans.

NT 3.51 was the first successful version of NT. NT 3.51 SP 5 was amazingly stable... it would be interesting to put an NT 3.51 SP 5 machine up against a Windows 2000 SP 2 (NT 5 SP 2) machine and compare.

Win32s was the backwards port of the core of the Win32 API to Win3.1. The two goals were:
1) Get new applications written against the Win32 API so NT (the future) would have some applications
2) Break OS/2 Windows compatibility layer... they kept changing Win32s until they broke OS/2, then they released apps for Win32s.

Windows 4.0 (Chicago AKA Windows 93 AKA Windows 95) was the version that combined DOS/Windows (to stop the DR-DOS onslaught) and introduced the Win32 API as the standard API. Win95 resulted in the Win32 apps that allowed NT to show some success on the desktop. NT 3.51 had some success as a server (very useful environment for managing Win3.1 desktops without the cost of Novell).

Win95 had some new APIs, which were mostly ported to NT 4 (except DirectX > 3 APIs). When I was at Citrix (MS Blocked WinFrame 2.0, then basically bought it to become Terminal Server), we couldn't support newer versions of IE because WinFrame 1.x was based upon NT 3.51, and IE required Win95/NT4 APIs.

Cairo was supposed to be the end of Windows with NT 4. Two years late and without a lot of functionality, NT 4 had (and still has!) some good server-side support and corporate desktop standing. When NT 4 lacked a lot of the functionality, MS declared that Cairo was a set of projects, not a release, and that some of them would be in NT 5. NT 5, two years late as Windows 2000, finally made a nearly API complete NT to match their home desktop dominance.

Windows XP appears to use a nearly identical system, focusing on a new user experience based on MacOS's improvements.

Microsoft has finaly achieved its 8 year goal of eliminating DOS support, ME was the end of the DOS based Windows, and it looks like all the old DOS games are finally dead. MS kept promissing better support for DOS apps/games in the next version of NT, but never delivered, instead stalling on their demise. Oh well.

Interestingly, NT 3.51 (I don't recall NT 3.5) was extremely portable, commercially supporting 4 processor families (this continued until NT 4, but the other platforms failled to take off).

The DOS support in NT, the NT VDM, emulated a 286, albeit much faster. This is the reason that you couldn't run fancy things in the DOS emulation, if it was a protected mode DOS API (386 DOS app), the NT VDM couldn't handle it.

Hopefully a better solution than VMWare (overkill, complexity, etc.) will exist to run old DOS games in emulation. My brother bought me the commercial version of Abuse (at one time a favorite) as a present, but I got it about 2 weeks after I migrated to NT 4 fulltime. Well, my new HTPC (home theater PC, just for gaming, I got me a progressive scan DVD player already) is going to be 98SE or ME based for gaming compatibility, so I guess I'll be able to play the old classics there.

Alex

Working with Gary

[keath_milligan]

From 1990 to 1993, I had the unique opportunity to work closely with Gary Kildall.

By that time, Gary was already in the process of separating himself officially from Digital Research (did you know it was originally named "Intergalactic Digital Research"?) to pursue other interests, but was still in touch with the company on a personal level.

It was a great experience and a wonderful way to start a geek career. I originally was hired to help build and test wire-wrapped prototypes (for an internet appliance no less! in 1990!). Quickly from there Gary recognized my coding abilities and I was writing embedded code within a few weeks of starting.

Microsoft had just released Windows 3.1 and boy was Gary pissed - apparently Microsoft had intentionally modified Windows since 3.0 to specifically not work on DR-DOS (and yes, that's Digital Research DOS, not "doctor DOS"). MS claimed otherwise, but it was enough to pretty much kill DR - DR-DOS never reclaimed the lost market share (the first killer-apps were beginning to hit big in Windows at that point) and you all know the rest of that story.

Now for some ancient history - I was always cringe when I hear the oft-repeated story that IBM chose MS-DOS over CP/M for the PC because Gary was out flying his airplane when they showed up or some variation thereof. This is at best a half-truth.

Gary was already a wealthy man by that point. CP/M was licensed by a variety of manufacturers and DR was doing reasonably well. At that time, there was no reason to think that one single computer architecture would rise to completely dominate the industry - you had Osbournes, Kaypros, Apples, Commodore PETs, and a host of other machines all with loyal followings.

When IBM was designing the PC, they didn't want to merely license a DOS from another company they wanted to own a DOS. This put Gary off, he viewed CP/M as having a future and he didn't want to completely sell out to IBM. Microsoft had no such reluctance. Microsoft sold PC-DOS to IBM and continued to produce MS-DOS - hence MS-DOS vs. PC-DOS. It was a happy relationship for a while, but we all know the rest of that story. DR did go on to license CP/M-86 to IBM as an alternative, but by that time, it was too little too late.

Also, I wanted to comment on the story that during a visit with IBM, Gary typed in some code on MS-DOS and made a Digital Research copyright notice appear - I'm pretty sure this is just an industry legend. Gary never accused them of stealing actual code, just stealing ideas.

Dear god.. could someone get their story straight?

[Anonymous Coward]

DOS was never present in the NT kernel. That's one of the reasons it's so much more stable than any of the 9x kernels, because they don't have to support old code.

Cmd.exe, Command.com, and any other variation is -not- DOS. It never was. Not even in DOS 1.0 was Command.com, "DOS". It was -always- just the commandline interface to the underlying OS which was DOS. Most linux users would understand that distinction between the OS and the UI, but for some reason Windows users don't always grasps this. ;)

Oh, and by the way, Windows XP is mostly just Windows 2000 with a pretty interface.. don't let MS fool you.

XP has "headless"-support

[rainer_d]

According to various articles on the net [google.com], MS will ship a version of XP that can run without a gfx-card.

IIRC, they have extended vt100 for that...

So, the cmd-line will be around for some time.

DOS Based Windows

[linebackn]

On occasions I have had to explain to people which versions of Windows really run on top of MS-DOS. It is somewhat confusing because MS changed all the names around. Here is a list that might be of interest here.

The following versions of Windows run on top of MS-DOS:
Windows 1.x
Windows 2.x
Windows 3.x
Windows 95 (Bundled MS-DOS 7.00 that is no longer sold as seperate product)
Windows 95 OSR2 (Bundled MS-DOS 7.10)
Windows 98 and 98SE (Bundled MS-DOS 7.10)
Windows ME (Bundled MS-DOS 8.00, but exiting to MS-DOS is now forbidden)

The following versions of Windows do not run on top of MS-DOS:
Windows NT 3.1
Windows NT 3.5x
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0)
Windows XP (NT 5.1)

Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit...

[WWWWolf]

Linux on the Desktop absolutely has to kill/prune this tangled hierarchy. Explain to me the distinction of "/usr/local" on a desktop machine?? *Everything* is LOCAL.

And what "Linux on the Desktop" has to do with file locations? I run GNOME and Nautilus and Mozilla and all the other stuff (only using command line for "tricky" tasks), and I don't need to know anything other than "um, my files are under directory /home/wwwwolf".

If we want a "desktop" shell, you just need to get one that supports $PATH - and I think popular shells did this before MS-DOS, our thing of comparison, was even invented.

And as for the explanation of /usr/local: /usr/local is a tree where, basically, you're allowed to install software that is independent of the packages. dpkg and rpm and whatever else your dist may be using for package handling put their stuff to /usr, and you're free to do whatever you want with /usr/local.

If you want to manage "packages" under /usr/local, I recommend Stow [gnu.org] - Basically, installation of new software that isn't prepackaged for your system can be as easy as:

./configure --prefix="/usr/local/stow/package-1.0"
make
make install
cd /usr/local/stow
stow package-1.0

This will create appropriate links to /usr/local subdirectories - /usr/local/bin/package will link to /usr/local/stow/package-1.0/bin/package and so on...

Deinstallation:

cd /usr/local/stow
stow -D package-1.0
rm -rf package-1.0

Re:er... dead? since when?

[drwiii]

Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\>

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

[Chris Mattern]

> 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.

That can't stand one bit of competition!

Chris Mattern

Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit...

[42forty-two42]

Very simple:
/bin - Critical apps, but used by regular users
/sbin - Critical appes, use by the superuser
/usr/bin - Not-so-critical apps.
/lib - Critical libraries
/usr/lib - Not much difference from /lib, maybe we should symlink them?
/usr/local - Stuff that didn't come with your linux distro
/usr/local/lib - libraries that didn't come with your linux distro
/usr/local/bin - executables that didn't come with your linux distro
/usr/share - Data that everyone can read
/opt - No clue. Optional stuff, maybe?
/var - Datafiles that change frequently. Used because you may want to put it on another partition, to reduce fragmentation
/tmp - Temporary files

Re:Win2K has name completion...

[JackDeth]

Change this registry setting:
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor\Completetion Char"
to 0x09 and TAB will work, even without /F:ON.

cmd /? will give you more information if you care.

Re:Remembering DOS

[sketerpot]

They can never completely get rid of DOS. Not while there are people with the intelligence to do things without Microsoft holding their hands.

As long as filesystem design stays the same, we can always port bash to Windows, or make a DOS emulator. Go to www.delorie.com/djgpp for links to cygwin, where you can find a shell for Windows. You might find a DOS emulator on the web.

We can resist the evil command line crushing power of Microsoft!

Re:Remembering DOS

[Sj0]

Would everyone quit it? Just because some news article says that dos is dead doesn't mean jack. Will your boot disks suddenly become dead? Will all the code suddenly stop working? The answer is a resounding NO. Hell, even under XP, the command prompt still exists. Sure, it's a castrated bastardized version of dos, but it's still there. Under linux, Bochs and dosemu run dos apps just fine (dosemu hates certain apps though...)

Even better, most of dos is utterly expandable. Drivers are relatively easy to write for it, programs written under dos can use any hardware which can be used by another OS (albiet usually through some hacked drivers, a la win9x :) ).

Just don't proclaim this OS dead because some new (and crappy) OS comes out.

Disclaimer: I have a dedicated DOS machine at home.

Does this mean that XP lacks the 16-bit subsystem?

[Animats]

NT, in its various forms, has a "16 bit subsystem" for running 16-bit programs. (In NT 3.x, you could choose not to install it; it was a separate module.) Was the 16-bit capability removed from XP? Finally? Please?

The thing that looks like an MS-DOS window under NT isn't. That's a 32-bit command line interpreter that runs on top of NT, looks vaguely like DOS, but has no involvement with the 16-bit system.

Re:Remembering DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be confused. There's a big difference between DOS and a command prompt. XP still has a command prompt (actually, you can choose your command prompt, since there are many others already available for NT/2k/XP), and there is DOS compatibility for old DOS apps. But, finally, MS-DOS itself is no longer part of the OS.

Re:Rumors of passing on are vastly overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

If an MS-DOS program doesn't work when you run it, you can set MS-DOS compatibility mode in the program's properties (right-click, properties, compatibility). It's *like* running a DOS emulator, except that you don't have as much overhead as you would with emulation, because it's just tricking the program into thinking it's running in a DOS environment (a little hard to explain to someone that doesn't understand NT without going into technical detail). Basically, in NT4 (not sure exactly how much this changed in 2k and XP), NT runs ntvdm.exe, which is the NT Virtual DOS Machine, which encapsulates the DOS app, ntio.sys and ntdos.sys, and virtual device drivers, which then talks to the 32-bit NT environment. One virtual machine is run for each DOS app, so if a DOS app fails, it won't take down the OS or other DOS apps running at the same time, the virtual machine just shuts itself down and the OS frees it's address space.

Missing the point

[jeffy210]

I think most of these posts are missing a point... DOS and the CLI are two different things. MS programmers routinly release cli based programs for doing all sorts of things. I think what's dead is the DOS based programs. But for most basic things (copy/ren/del) the cli is still living on strong.