MS-DOS 1981-2002 RIP 582
Biedermann writes "This is not exactly hot news, just a quick reminder to count the last days: A table in this article tells us that MS-DOS (as well as Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and NT 3.5x) reach their "End of Life" (as defined by Microsoft) on December 31, 2002.
Come on, even if you loathed them, they were good for jokes at least."
Say what you want.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ahh the memories... (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, my first experience with computers was on some old SGI workstations that a teacher at school let us play with after school. We hacked away, not knowing what in the hell we were doing, but happy to have the opportunity to learn.
Alas, the fun ended when our local warez BBS was discovered and the SPA shut us down... Luckily, we didn't have to spend time in juvenille hall, and the hi-jinks didn't end up on our permanent records!
Is redhat 2.0x still supported? (Score:3, Insightful)
This leave another question. Do any of you still run old distro's?
Now, how many people still run Windows 95 or NT 3.51 at work?
It's not really dead (Score:3, Insightful)
But then there is FreeDOS [freedos.org], which looks to be alive and well, and being GPL'd free software, is unlikely to stop being so any time soon.
Re:Hey, don't knock DOS... (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess what? The DOS command line is a stripped down, sodomized version of most *nix shells. If you liked DOS, install your favorite UNIX variant, and try out bash. (Feel free to use ksh or csh to your liking.) You get pipes that work in parallel, input and output redirection (plus separating stdout and stderr), wildcard expansion, tab completion, and a consistent quoting syntax. Also, very complicated pieces of software -- including
DOS is well and good, but it's a poor substitute for a Real Command Line (TM).
Re:Uh oh... (Score:3, Insightful)
What about poor old DR-DOS?
He had a slight accident when someone referred Windows to MS-DOS for it's needs, and made it so that Windows could no longer be seen working with the good DR (followed up by the malpractice suit, and MS-DOS cheating on and paying off of Stac).
And surprising, too (Score:3, Insightful)
What's surprising is that DOS *hasn't* been replaced by something better and more similar to the shells available under Unix. One of the first things people talk about as being reasons to use UNIX over Windows is the power and flexibility of the shell.
At the very least I would have expected something more sh(1)-like, even if it did choose to include a lot of older MS-DOS commands. At the most I would have expected something that was *compatible* with sh(1) with a lot of the extensions from bash or zsh that people have come to expect, along with the kinds of things that would make it useful in a Windows GUI environment, like some *very* basic GUI dialog features that could prompt for yes/no or single line input without a invoking a cmd shell, but no complex windowing behavior or event-driven programming.
MS has responded with the "improved" features of the NT command shell and Windows scripting (which I presume is a VB script derivative), without realizing that DOS batch file compatibility isn't terribly helpful and complex VBScript and GUI interaction won't get used.
People, especially admins, want a fair amount of power (loops, variables, substitions, output redirection, etc) and no complex GUI interaction or dependencies. But they want security and stability, too, and MS hasn't always made it a priority to deliver those features either...
Re:And surprising, too (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like 4Dos or the version of bash they ported to win32?
Just because you can't get them from MS doesn't mena you can't get them.
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:5, Insightful)
OS: Operating System
DOSDisk Operating System
Now, to tear you apart like a hungry lion on a small lamb...
DOS wasn't that bad of an OS. That's no bullshit.
Well, DOS was hardly an OS in the first place.
See above definition
Most of the stuff that is part of OSes simply do not exist in DOS: sound drivers, GUI, system services, etc.
I hate to destroy your perception of things, but... System Services = Bloat
Sound Drivers = Multimedia Support (Which was actually available in MS-DOS)
GUI=Graphical User Interface... (known as a UI not an OS, the UI is a *part of an OS, but it has nothing to do with it either being or not being an OS)
Is there really anything DOS could do, except launch programs?
Actually yes, many things... I know of companies that still use DOS for many things to this day for accounting, customer tracking, or other important tasks.
Now, other than that... I will admit that programming programs to use only 64k of memory was indeed a challenge, but hey it's the challenge that what makes things worth doing.
Re:Ahh the memories... (Score:5, Insightful)
a: or
c: or
c:> or $
dir or ls
format c: or mke2fs
Those are all pretty stupid comparisons. Obviously any partitions would be mounted somewhere meaningful and not used from
Re:MS-DOS wasn't all that bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, just yesterday I used an old DOS Netboot disk to copy some files over to a machine I was setting up.
Microsoft can obsolete DOS, but as of yet they haven't introduced a replacement that can get a machine on the network with a single floppy disk. I doubt they'll ever get a version of NT working from read-only media.
Re:think about this: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not valid. And reread it: the word "NEARLY" appears in the original, you've neglected to mention that. It was not an absolute statement for the very purpose of placating the frothing legions of fools. Unix, in the manner which you use it, is not a cohesive operating system, but rather a generic term used to describe operating systems with UNIX (tm) as their base.
Re:MS-DOS wasn't all that bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:3, Insightful)
DOS can do accounting and customer tracking?
It's amazing. If it's from Microsoft all 3rd party-effort (like accounting or customer tracking applications, or in the case of Windows drivers.) all of the sudden is credited to Microsoft.
Face it: DOS is a very, very primitive OS. Even in 1981 when it was released, it was already outdated. A decade later, when it was still shipped on most PCs, it was even more outdated. multi-user, multitasking... As a die-hard Microsoft user you probably don't know, but those existed long before Windows - and also before DOS.
End-Of-Life = abandonedware (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:bleh (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone should have told that to Andrew Schulman [undoc.com] and his co-authors, and they wouldn't have wasted time writing Undocumented DOS (Addison-Wesley, 1990) [amazon.com].
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you judge Windows 2000 / XP today by how outdated Windows 1.0 was when it was released? After all, it didn't even have overlapping Windows! That's just holding a grudge, wouldn't you say?
A decade later, when it was still shipped on most PCs, it was even more outdated. multi-user, multitasking... As a die-hard Microsoft user you probably don't know, but those existed long before Windows - and also before DOS.
It would really depend on how you define "primitive", and how necessary those (often bloated) "advanced" features are. If the user doesn't really need more than what DOS offers, no multi-tasking, no bells and whistles, runs a large collection of existing software, then does it really matter how old it is? A battery-powered, 5 speed Model Uber-2000 screwdriver would still be passed over today by most people for a simple philips that fits neatly in a small toolbox.
DOS still has its fans today. See the FreeDOS project [freedos.org]. If such a project can improve DOS (I've been under the understanding that it stands for Direct Operating System) to a 32-bit operating system that does many of the things that modern operating systems do today while still maintaining the simple and efficient elements of older DOSes, why should it ever "die"?
Re:Command line interface and real-time control go (Score:2, Insightful)
Secondly, MS has nothing to do with command prompt interfaces of third party utlities. I have several utilities that I wrote for myself, and they all have command line interfaces so that I can fire them with an AT job. Work just fine. If the utility has no command line interface, then that's the fault of the utility. That's like me saying that Mozilla is a buggy, slow, pile of crap, so Linux is too. Makes no sense.
Re:Hey, don't knock DOS... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, *real* power users loaded the MKS or Thompson toolkits and had real, functioning Unix utilities and sort-of functioning shells on thier PCs... I still have a Win16 version of the MKS Toolkit out in the garage somewhere - I think it cost around $400, and was worth every penny. (But the way it handled remapping of slashes to backslashes produced some "interesting" problems, IIRC...)
Kinda like *real* power users replace the crap GNU utilities in Linux with the true Unix-style BSD utilities even today...