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?'"
Sad to see DOS go (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sad to see DOS go (Score:3, Funny)
(L)augh, (R)etry, (F)ail.
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: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.
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.
Re:Remembering DOS (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with what you most of what you say, but ....
Don't confuse DOS with the command line. DOS itself was a horrible cludge. The command line (contained in command.com) was not much better, but much better for some tasks than the Windows GUI. Windows NT & 2000 left DOS out long before XP and they both still had a Command Line (not as useful as a bash, but better than nothing).
Re:Sad to see DOS go (Score:2)
doskey exit=@for %a in (%windir%\*) do start "DOS LIVES!"$Texit
Passed away My furry little hiney (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet another reason NOT to go to Microsoft for new software.
Rumors of passing on are vastly overrated (Score:3, Interesting)
Can't expect old dogs like me to leap on the bandwagon just because there is one. Maybe someone will write an MS_DOS emulator for XP ;-)
FreeDOS / DOSEmu (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Links my Man, Linkz... (Score:2, Informative)
FreeDOS [freedos.org]
DOSEmu [dosemu.org]
There is a lot of info on the net too, just google it.
autoexec.bat and config.sys (Score:2)
~Aaron.
In lieu of flowers... (Score:2)
Good plan! Let's donate to open source projects in honor of the death of DOS.
Mmmm... irony. Good stuff.
Little content, little meaning... (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, I'd be willing to argue that the removal of legacy DOS functionality isn't always a good thing. You break functionality with code that used to run on previous MS Operating systems. Furthermore, I'd imagine everyone who's been working in computers for awhile has watched the Windows GUI break, and then need the command prompt to fix it.
Now on the other hand, this may be a plus. Microsoft might actually believe that Windows is stable enough that you don't need the DOS prompt anymore. Stability is always good. But even on the most stable platform in the world, I'd still rather not have something crippled from my operating system just because MS doesn't think I need it anymore.
But back to this little tid bit of a story...just a marketing ploy, not really news.
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:Little content, little meaning... (Score:2)
Microsoft has believed that since 1993, when Windows NT 3.1 came out.
Anyway, this isn't about "not needing a command prompt" as NT (and 2000 and XP) have always had one. It's about finally having a Windows operating system for the home that isn't kludged on top of ye olde DOS. (Instead, ye olde DOS is kludged on top of Windows NT.
Ian
Re:Little content, little meaning... (Score:2)
I thought that the first NT was actually version 3.51, or am I wrong. Either way, MS did think it was stable since then
NT Started at NT 3.1 (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:NT Started at NT 3.1 (Score:2)
Actually, XP has a feature that lets you choose what operating system the application is supposed to run under, for compatibility. I beleive you can choose from 95 up to ME. It should fool any game into thinking it is running in that OS.
*Should*.
The DOS prompt is still there. (Score:2)
at least on XP RC2, you can easily get to the command line.
I use it for Perl stuff sometimes, and ping and things. It might not be full DOS (oh, the loss of that extreme power will be sorely felt), but it is a command line.
Re:Little content, little meaning... (Score:3, Interesting)
(1) this article is a marketing ploy
(2) removing MS-DOS from XP breaks backward compatibility
(3) command line necessary restore to working order
(4) stable enough withouit CLI
But i'll handle them out of order.
(2) Removing MS-DOS from XP breaks backward compatibility
If you're interested in backward compatibility of DOS-based progranms, then you shouldn't upgrade to XP in the fist place. Successive versions of Windows from 95 on have successively had less DOS-compatuibility then it's predecessor. By now, if I need DOS functionality, I wouldn't upgrade to XP even if it had a CLI. (Actually, if I needed MS-DOS compatibility, I FOR SURE would not have gone past 98, if even that far.)
(3) Command line necessary restore to working order
Yeah, I'll agree. Or, you could alternately do what most people do: ctl-alt-del, then reset button if that doesn't work (and then for me, there was one time I had to pull the power cord because even the reset button was frozen). Admitedly, if it's important enough that I don't want to reboot, then a CLI is very necessary. But when I'm in Windows, and it crashes, then I normally won't be able to bring up a CLI anyway, nor would I even be able to fix it should that be possible.
(4) Stable enough withouit CLI
From (3): "When I'm in Windows, and it crashes, then I won't be able to bring up a CLI anyway." At this point, the only thing I ever use a Windows CLI for is to use ping to see if my network problems are on my end or my ISP's. (it's usually my ISP's: RoadRunner SUCKS! but that's a different thread....) I LOVE my Linux CLI. It's more than a mere "Command Line Interface," but actually a small, on-the-fly, resizeable interpreter with a scrollable history. But the Windows CLI is so limited that it's not really all that useful for me.
(1) This article is merely a marketing ploy
Maybe. The conference and celebrity collection probably was a marketing ploy, but it's hard to say whether the article was or not. Either way, this is interesting, and it's hard to deny that (a) MS-DOS is dead (has been "effectively dead" for a while), and (b) it was very important in its day.
weylin
16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now they're finally leaving 16-bit behind, only to introduce similiar (if not worse) hacks between 32-bit and 64-bit OSes. Instead of following their old design (which at least would have been consistent), they opted to use the system32 folder to hold 64-bit stuff, and to have another folder (is it system64?) hold the 32-bit stuff.
Confused yet?
Oh well...
Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit... (Score:2)
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.
Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit... (Score:4, Informative)
/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.
Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit... (Score:2)
Yeah, it seems crazy, but there are good reasons [pathname.com] for keeping around most of the Unixisms that Linux still has. There are no good reasons for many of the hacks and 64-bit incompatibilities in the Win32 API, or for Win16 to ever have existed.
Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit... (Score:2)
No. Never once. And I could come up with loads of examples that break those nice neat "rules" above, but I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader.
Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit... (Score:2)
There's still a good reason to have a distinction between /bin and /usr/bin. /bin is normally on the root partition and the commands there will be available in maintenance mode. /usr/bin will normally be on a much larger disk, so you can put lots of stuff there, but it won't normally be mounted in maintenance mode.
Keeping the root partition small means it's less likely to get f**ked up on the event of serious problems, so you just put those commands in /bin that you really need in order to recover the machine.
Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit... (Score:2)
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office Too
ls>
Re:Win2K has name completion... (Score:4, Informative)
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor\Completetion Char"
to 0x09 and TAB will work, even without
cmd
We will always carry it with us... (Score:2, Interesting)
It all began with DOS and DOS will end it as well, or something very much like it - GUI's are overrated. Sometimes you just want a Quick and Dirty Operating System that goes well with scripting, say changing your entire folder of mp3 to use a standard name or just organizing images, perhaps you need to do something that the GUI cant handle. There's nothing a prompt cant handle!
Long boring story short -> DOS as we know it is dead, but Quick and Dirty Operating System's are the future.
Long live DOS!
--
DOS is Alive! FreeDos..... (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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: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?
anti-Microsoft conspiracy theories (Score:4, Interesting)
It makes it rather convenient.
At the time there was no secret that the new MS-DOS was very similar to CP/M-80. CP/M is what people were used to using and seeing, and so Patterson designed his new OS for 16 bit processors to behave similarly. But there were also pieces of functionality that arrived into MS-DOS that were similar to Unix.
It's also entirely possible that it included some similar code. CP/M-80 BDOS could be disassembled and carried in your briefcase. It only took up around 5-7K of RAM and wasn't that complicated at all.
Besides, if MS-DOS had really been a copy of CP/M, wouldn't it have also implemented the PIP and STAT commands?
But the real question is... does it matter?
From everything I've read of Gary Kildall and Digital Research, already at the time IBM first approached them the company was too big for Kildall's liking. He was not a manager, he hated it. But he was also a control freak and couldn't stand someone else running things for him.
One story I read indicated that he often would walk around the office building afraid to go in, and that at one point he even offered to sell the whole thing to a friend of his for $50,000.
One of the realities is that some people are willing to grab success, and others aren't. There are a lot of people in this world who purposefully miss an opportunity because they are unhappy or uncomfortable with assuming the responsibility it might entail.
Kildall was one such person. Obviously Bill Gates is not.
It's that difference in personalities that is really the secret behind Microsoft.
Personally, I know that I'm a lot like Gary Kildall in that regard. But knowing this I also try to not be resentful when I pass up an opportunity.
Alternate shells (Score:3, Interesting)
There is still the problem of having to wait for each stage of the pipe to finish before the next can begin, but there is definately life in the old DOS yet and I'll be using JP's shells long after COMMAND/CMD has gone the way of the dodo.
Hold on, is this a troll ? (Score:2)
Is it too much to ask the slashdot editors to check things like this before posting ? This troll is not even worthy of inadequacy.org [inadequacy.org]
Hilarious: EMM386 stop error (Score:5, Funny)
"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
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.
Re:Quick and Dirty Interrupt Handler (Score:2)
I find it funny how people are equating "DOS is dead" to "No more CLI in Windows".
DOS was never a part of WinNT, Win2K, or WinXP. Yet, all three have command prompts.
Re:Quick and Dirty Interrupt Handler (Score:2)
How exactly would you implement such protections on processors (eg 8086) which don't support protected memory?
I'll agree that there are many thing that MS-DOS did not do, but in most cases such things were impossible on x86 hardware until the 286 (and the 386 if you wanted to do things properly).
Re:Quick and Dirty Interrupt Handler (Score:2)
DOS was nothing but a glorified interrupt handler. It wasn't unstable, since there was practically nothing to be unstable with.
Hmmm? You seem to be saying it didn't support multitasking or protected memory so it wasn't operating system. By your definition, CP/M isn't an operating system, Apple DOS and Apple ProDOS aren't operating systems.
What is an OS? An interface between the application program and the hardware right?
DOS was all of that. It had an API even (INT 21h). It did the file management, disk access functions, even some rudimentary memory management. (Better memory management came in later releases. EMM386.EXE is surely part of DOS, right?
Re:Quick and Dirty Interrupt Handler (Score:2, Interesting)
So you should really be thrashing Intel for making a processor that did not support VM, Multitasking, Task Switching (Interrupts are just that, but a lame form) or kernel/user space differences. Not DOS. Dos was really cool, for the time it existed primarily.
However, Microsoft *SHOULD* have migrated to 32bit dos with the advent of the 386 processor from intel.
Re:Quick and Dirty Interrupt Handler (Score:2)
No more 16-bit DOS code... again? (Score:5, Funny)
What, again??
Re:No more 16-bit DOS code... again? (Score:3, Funny)
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
Re:No more 16-bit DOS code... again? (Score:3, Informative)
>
>
> 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
er... dead? since when? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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:DOS was good (Score:2)
>learning experience for all who used and programmed for it.
It was certainly an education!
- look what dros we can actually sell!
- Oh look you're computer has crashed again!
- Clashes between TSR programs anyone?
- 640K limits anyone?
- horrible command line interface
- needed half a dozen separate programs to make it even faintly usable- and not really even then.
Byte: A Eulogy (Score:2)
Re:Byte: A Eulogy (Score:2)
I've heard it before (Score:2)
Does Micrsoft still license DOS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Somehow I don't think DOS is as dead as they make it out.
I guess we will never know... (Score:4, Funny)
I guess this means we will now never know the correct answer to -
Error reading drive A:
Abort, Retry, Ignore?
DOS Software (Score:5, 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:DOS Software (Score:2)
Drop that QBasic into C, build it up on Linux, and welcome to the present.
DOS Could have survived (Score:3, Insightful)
It just wasn't in their best interested to do so.
Re:DOS Could have survived (Score:2)
Which would have turned it into Windows, surely?
What's in a name: DOS (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What's in a name: DOS (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's in a name: DOS (Score:2)
However, NT is POSIX compliant, just as much as Linux is, in fact. POSIX is a very general and practically useless standard; it's very easy to implement because it defines very little, and leaves many important considerations out.
Re:What's in a name: DOS (Score:4, Interesting)
*cough*
Back when IBM and MS were all buddy-buddy still, they started working on a DOS-killer by the name of "OS/2." OS/2 1.x came out from both companies much in the same was as early MS/PC-DOS releases. From there, though, differences in coding opinion brought about a code forking in its successors. On the one hand, IBM went on to make OS/2 2.x, and ever onward to OS/2 Warp.
On Microsoft's side of the fork, they were working on OS/2 3.0. They took what they had of the code, put the ol' Windows 3.1 GUI on top of it, and released it. However, instead of calling it "OS/2 3.x," they opted instead to rename it "Windows NT 3.x." Ever wonder why Windows XP can run programs that use older OS/2 instruction sets, or why NT up to 3.51 could read HPFS?
More details are available at a rather interesting article over here [cthome.net].
So, I guess I'm just trying to point out that they didn't do a very good job with NT at the lower levels. IBM did.
DOS will never die. (Score:3, Informative)
DOS lives on at IBM (Score:4, Funny)
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
Re:DOS lives on at IBM (Score:2)
For the record, OS/2's DOS support is generally superior to PC-DOS itself, with the exception of a few apps (mostly games) that won't run.
Uh-oh - is it really gone? (Score:2)
My solution was a set of batch files that ran when the CD was inserted. The "installation program" was interactive, including a menu with several options. The program did things like selectively copy files, changed permissions from read-only to read write (files copied from a CD were read-only by default), verify network shares and copy files to other computers, and even updated DLLs if necessary (reboot required). It took about a week to develop, but simplified the instructions a great deal (Close program on all PCs, Insert CD, Select 2, Reboot all PCs when done).
Is MS-DOS really gone, or do they have the same kind of MS-DOS emulation that WinNT has? And, if it is gone, does anyone know of a free scripting language that would perform like DOS Batch files? I'd hate to think if there was a hardware failure I'd have to buy an installation software suite, or convince the customer to install a nationwide secure network...
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)
Pulling the plug on old DOS (Score:2, Funny)
"Keyboard error, press F1 to resume."
DOS is not dead (Score:3, Interesting)
Also the company I work for still active sells and supports TWO DOS applications. Both are property management programs. Both have large install bases countrywide. Our main product has finally developed a stable window's version and we are slow converting people, but most of our users are still on the DOS version.
DOS is not dead, it is just being phased out of the M$ OSes. This is something that they should have done long ago, but from the comments I have been seeing and hearing they did not remove the limitations that DOS placed on the windows products. Seems that while they may have removed the DOS code, they have not gotten rid of the bloat that it created. Once again M$ gives us a half-assed version of what Windows could be.
As a VAR we will be telling every one of our clients to avoid Windows XP like the plague, if just for the DOS issue. This is hard to do as for some reason small businesses buy computers with Windows ME and Windows XP Home Ed. We still push Windows 98 and have just now started supporting Windows 2000 and now there is a new Windows OS. I am so happy, now I will get to go to sites with Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP Home (and pro may be) and a couple Windows 2000s thrown in. All in time for M$ to come in and audit the place for valid licenses. Ridiculous.
Friendly
Beer pong, the gentleman's drinking game.
MS-DOS doesn't deserve a fond remembrance (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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
Working with Gary (Score:3, Informative)
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? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
DOS Based Windows (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Does this mean that XP lacks the 16-bit subsystem? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
In the Beginning... (Score:4, Funny)
Then, Microsoft bought it, got rid of the "Quick" and kept the "Dirty."
That left us with MS-DOS.
Re:Why does Gates get the credit ? (Score:4, Flamebait)
DOS wasn't licensed from Gary Kildall (who actually was the father of CP/M), but from Tim Paterson.
You would have known this if you had read the article you're commenting on.
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:Linux Version? (Score:2)
If it doesn't work, try dosemu with DR-DOS [bero.org] - not open source, but at least $0.
Re:It's funny... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:It's funny... (Score:2)
cmd.exe is a Win32 console application that is designed to somewhat emulate DOS. But it is no more DOS than Wine is Windows.
And as for command.com, command.com is no more DOS than bash is Linux. command.com is a DOS application that gives you a shell to work in, much like bash, when compiled on Linux, is a Linux application that gives you a shell to work in. Sorry, I lied, we did get into it.
Re:It's funny... (Score:2)
Duh. Nobody ever said it was. It's the command-line/batch interpreter for Win32.
And it's not designed to emulate DOS . . . it's designed to emulate COMMAND.COM in 32 bits. The DOS emulator is called NTVDM.EXE (that's NT Virtual DOS Machine), and also runs as a 32-bit application.
Furthermore, Win32 still has COMMAND.COM. It is a 16-bit application (and therefore runs under NTVDM.EXE). And I'm sure it's basically legacy code recompiled with new version information.
So, in closing, you're a dumbass, your OS sucks, and, uh, my granny can code better than you.
Re:It's funny... (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, actually, I suppose Bill doesn't do all that much development any more, so maybe not.
Not only does XP have the command prompt (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not only does XP have the command prompt (Score:2)
I started using MS-DOS with version 3.3, where edlin was the only editor available. But it was so yucky I never learned to use it, preferring 'copy con filename' to create a file and 'copy con +filename' to append. I think I used the editor built into XTree for other stuff.
Then last year I wanted an automated way to reboot some NT machines into Linux, by changing NT's boot menu. This is a text file boot.ini which you edit. How can this be done automatically?
Well you can guess the answer: good old edlin is still included with NT to this day (though I expect it's a 32-bit rewrite rather than the DOS assembler version). So I dug out an IBM manual for MS-DOS 2.0 and worked out how to change the boot.ini file using the One True Editor. For extra perversity, I wasn't running it myself but rather writing a Perl script [ic.ac.uk] which uses the Expect module to telnet to an NT box, run edlin and then reboot it.
So I never needed to learn edlin for MS-DOS, but it still comes in handy for Windows systems two decades later...
Re:Not only does XP have the command prompt (Score:2, Interesting)
That interesting - just did a quick check and found that Win95a, Win98SE and ME DON'T have edlin, while WinNT, 2K and XP DO have edlin. I guess they expected the dos/home line to not need it, but the professional line did need it to support old edlin scripts?
Re:It's funny... (Score:2)
Better shell with tabcomp and the like.
Re:GONE? (Score:2, Interesting)
Besides, I rather liked dos. I never installed windows until 98 was released (sure it restricted my games, but Win3.11? Come on. And by the time I'd been convinced by 95, 98 had been released.)
And at least the command prompt is still here, and getting more and more powerful; in Win2k there's a proper grep utility, and even a poor man's version of awk. It isn't a full programming language, but it allows you to parse a stream token by token - type 'help for' to see what I mean.
Still, I'm glad to be mostly rid of 8/16bit code.
Re:Fond .bat memories (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Fond .bat memories (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Fond .bat memories (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Fond .bat memories (Score:2)
Re:So I guess XP finally gets to Mac OS7 level (Score:2, Informative)
bsh != unix
cmd != dos
The death of DOS does not mean the death of the Microsoft CLI.
Re:DOS prompt =Terminal? (Score:2)
Built-in task list and killing, for example.
Re:Windows for Pens? (Score:2)
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.
Microsoft Bob. (Score:4, Funny)
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
Re:MacOS's vastly inferior and triumphant rival (Score:3, Funny)