MS DOS: A Eulogy 794
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?'"
Passed away My furry little hiney (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet another reason NOT to go to Microsoft for new software.
FreeDOS / DOSEmu (Score:2, Insightful)
Quick and Dirty Interrupt Handler (Score:4, Insightful)
DOS was nothing but a glorified interrupt handler. It wasn't unstable, since there was practically nothing to be unstable with.
It didn't protect itself from userland programs, which is generally considered a bad thing. Granted, this gave the programmer freedom to completely work around the operating system, but at the same time allowed said programs to royally mess things up.
From a single-task, single-user system, it was quite good, provided the programs behaved nicely. DOS Extensions even provided it with protected memory, making life a bit easier.
New command interpreters, like 4DOS, injected new life into the system.
If you accepted it as a single-user, single-task enviroment, it was adequate.
I find the decision to remove any and all CLI from Windows a bit odd, considering that Apple went the opposite direction with Mac OS X.
DOS was good (Score:5, Insightful)
Trey, DOS wasnt the best desktop/server/handheld Operating System, but it surely was a great learning experience for all who used and programmed for it.
I still use TurboC on DOS when I need to try out some small program, and dont want to wait for linux to load.
Another point, I dont think you can ever have a successful operating system without any command prompt. Copying and moving files can never be as easy using a dumb GUI file manager.
Re:Why does Gates get the credit ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gates liscensed DOS from SCP. SCP based their product on CP/M, originally written by Gary Kildall.
DOS was advanced by the standards of microcomputers of the day. CP/M's 16-bit version, CP/M-86 wasn't ready when MS-DOS 1.0 hit the market, and by the time CP/M-86 did ship, MS-DOS already hit version 2.0. Version 2 had neat-o features like subdirectories and a Unix-like C API that pushed it ahead of CP/M. CP/M eventually did surpass DOS, but it was called DR-DOS by that time.
Of course, DOS was well behind most all versions of Unix, including Microsoft's Xenix. Peter Norton once wrote that Xenix might have been the "operating system" of the future. Unfortunately, Mitch Kapor wrote Lotus 1-2-3 to run under MS-DOS rather than Xenix. In those days, people bought PCs to run Lotus. The operating system was just the black screen with gibberish text you saw before Lotus booted up.
Re:Little content, little meaning... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well I haven't seen the GUI "break," but I do still use the commandline, and it's still in Windows XP. It's just not DOS any more... Big whoop.
Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit... (Score:5, Insightful)
DOS Could have survived (Score:3, Insightful)
It just wasn't in their best interested to do so.
Remembering DOS (Score:5, Insightful)
Even through I now solely use Linux I will miss DOS. It was my first operating system and my lifeline whenever the users on the network screwed up with their Window$ boxes.
With DOS and Doom I learned syntaxsis, options and commands. It gave me the challenge and the boost necessary for me to head towards an IT career.
So long DOS, you were Window$ last hope!
Re:DOS was "closer" to CP/M Than most realize (Score:2, Insightful)
So how do you (or the author of the book) know about it, if the suit and settlement were such a well-kept secret? Sure you aren't making this up on the fly?
Re:Remembering DOS (Score:5, Insightful)
Even through I now solely use Linux I will miss DOS. It was my first operating system and my lifeline whenever the users on the network screwed up with their Window$ boxes.
I often think its funny how a lot of people cite the use of the command line as being a factor in slowing its spread.
Back in the "old days" everybody use DOS, and the command line ruled.
Maybe my friends weren't typical - but I remember in Windows 3.1 days many of them would say "Oh, that'd be easier in DOS".
Now with the GUI spread of Windows people are being taught to think of command line utilities as old fashioned - and less powerfull, which is clearly a mistake.
All the best games use DOS (Score:4, Insightful)
Dos games were great because the graphics SUCKED so you *HAD* to tell a good story to keep anyone interested
IMHO, 3d was the worst thing to happen to games. Kids buy games for "Awesome graphics" (tell me what that means someone)... because people are too stupid anymore to tell presentation from content! If you wrap a pile of shit in pretty box they'll pay for it
(end rant)
Re:MS-DOS is dead; long live AI-OS (Score:3, Insightful)
You must not have been a CP/M user -- that's Kildall's fault, not Allen's. CP/M used the "/" for options, as in "program/opt1/opt2", and DOS was first and foremost a CP/M workalike.
Re:Fond .bat memories (Score:3, Insightful)
Edlin is more accurately a clone of ed, the line editor upon which vi is based. I'd bet that edlin predates vi.
Re:Remembering DOS (Score:4, Insightful)
You think so? I find it much easier to use a gui than a command line when moving/copying/deleting files. That right-click menu comes in handy, I can move entire directories across multiple networked drives in seconds with 3 clicks, while in DOS it would be much more convoluted, and you wouldnt have a recycle bin to hold those "mistakenly deleted" files...
I can't count the number of times I've tried doing some file management in DOS (usually while Windows was crapped out) and thought "man this would be so much easier in Windows".
Oh and let's not forget Scandisk... that oh-so-helpful windows tool to keep your drive in top-condition. The other day windows stopped working because of a faulty long-filename. I ran scandisk from the DOS prompt (because Windows would NOT load) and it told me "we found errors but couldnt fix them, run scandisk for windows". Gee thanks...
Now that I think back... weren't Win95/98/ME/2K all supposed to be "the death of DOS"... but years later and it's still around.
DOS Hardly Gone (Score:3, Insightful)
I havn't used XP yet but I'll be surprised if these DOS features have been removed:
Directory structures starting with a 'drive' letter
Text/Binary open Mode for files (the notorious ^Ms)
The inability to delete a file which is open
File types based on .xxx extension
OS compontents still using 8.3 filename format
Most Stable Microsoft OS ever (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Bill can't get no respect... (Score:1, Insightful)
1. There is a CLI in Windows XP Professional (I know, I bought it, I'm running it at home).
2. The CLI in Windows XP is not DOS, it's Windows XP, based on the NT codebase. The INTERFACE IS NOT THE OS!!! The CLI is just an alternative way of interactive with the OS.
3. In Windows 95/98/SE/ME, on the other hand, everything was overlayed on DOS, partially explaining the frequency of the blue screen of death.
4. In Windows NT/2K/XP, there is no DOS layer underneath Windows.
5. The story is about the fact that the Windows 95-ME line has been ended with the advent of Windows XP Home, the first home consumer edition of the NT code.
In Windows 3.1, one would boot into DOS, then start a program called win to get into Windows; you could add it to your autoexec.bat to autostart it, but could easily interrupt it. In Windows 95, one would boot into DOS, which would then autostart into Windows; the only way to prevent the autostart was to go into the safe mode dialogue (a DOS dialogue) and select a choice to start into DOS, or to select "Restart in MSDOS Mode" in the Shut Down menu. In Windows NT/2K/XP, there's simply no DOS layer. Everything is Windows code, the GUI, the CLI, everything. All the old DOS code has been ripped out, and backwards compatibility to programs written for DOS has been achieved with new code. So that's what the story is about - the end of the DOS/Windows line of code and the application of the Windows NT line of code to Home operating systems.
Bill Gates is a money mongering twit (Score:1, Insightful)
processor
then what the heck are you doing in the computer
business?
Anyone who needs one can make one.
Microsoft didn't invent the ROM monitor.
DOS was crap, everyone knows it.
JUST AS AN EXCERCISE:
create your own commandline processor.
I've done it two or three times for four
or five different companies.
It is not hard.
PS: Bill Gates is a money-mongering twit.
Have you ever learned how to use DOS? (Score:2, Insightful)
Then in the late 80's, my parents got me a Mac Plus. It was an interesting machine, to learn and use. I had a few games, Microsoft Word and Works, a spreadsheet program, and some disk utilities. I learned how to use hypercard, and learned all the settings in the apple menu.
After about a year's use, I found it to be less and less intersting.
My parents put a modem in their computer and got prodigy, one of the fore-runners to the internet. It was awesome. Two, they got me a programming book, I found it very enjoyable.
I'd wonder, why didn't I have this stuff for Mac, more programs, or even a Hard Drive? They were too expensive and too hard to find.
I soon was given my parents XT. It was fast, and stable. Not this constant editing of config.sys or autoexec.bat, once you set up it is done.
It is true, side by side, the XT was more stable. If it would hang up, you were probably trying out a new program. Just reset, and your back in seconds. If that happened on the Mac, it would happen all the time, with almost all the programs! It would corrupt disks, and the disks were expensive! On the XT, I used 360 KB disks, and I remember only once corrupting a disk.
The reset button for the Mac was funny, because it was removible, and had a debug window, and something else wierd with it I can't remember. The programmible menu had a commands that I knew out of a book I had, but there was never any help for it on the computer, you couldn't use it like even the debug command in DOS because I didn't know what the options were.
Well there are lots of things I can talk about the Mac, but lets finish by talking about a little of what you said.
By the time DOS and Windows 3.x rolled around, I found that they were definately superior. My brother put Win3.1 on his computer, a 386 with VGA, and later bought a sound card. It was the first time that I had seen Full Motion Video with AVI in windows. It was very cool. And it only costed him a few hundred dollars. This was 1992 technology, and I compared this with the Macs at the time. I found them unbelievibly behind. They were still selling Mac Pluses, SE's and Mac II's were way too expensive. You had to buy a Mac IIfx to get any where near what my brother could do.
And another note, Apple sued Microsoft over Windows 1.0, way back in 1985 I believe, so that has nothing to do with Win95.
Conclusion, I've learned both OS's, and I know how they work side-by-side. It is true that Mac's are technologically inferior. They have always been overpriced. And their standards have always leaned on the rest of the industry. Even today, I've admin Mac networks, and it's the same.
The people that compared Win95 to Mac are right when they said they are the same, because they looked the same, but that doesn't have any bearing on the other argument-they always have been technologically inferior. If there was hypocrisy from and DOS person, he doesn't know what he's talking about to start-he's just repeating what everyone else says-But I've have learned for the fact, Macs have always been inferior.