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."
Ahh the memories... (Score:1, Interesting)
Hey, don't knock DOS... (Score:5, Interesting)
Even after going from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, I still found it better to do 80% of my stuff from the command line. Windows 98 SE finally kicked me off of that habit
Sigh, command lines... so fun, so minimalist. I don't like my start menu
Lordfly
Good riddance. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:1, Interesting)
This makes sense, since DOS wasn't written by microsoft: they subcontracted it out.
History could have been much different had IBM chosen CP/M for the PC OS.
DOS RIP really December 31, 2005 (Score:5, Interesting)
The one date companies are concerned about is the non-supported date for NT4, which is this coming June 2003.
to open source (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, the good old days (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I used to use the fabulous CONED program, which allowed you to create a bunch of autoexec/config files and switch between them. This, coupled with the even fabulous-er Xtreegold meant my DOS setup was pretty much unbeatable.
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:3, Interesting)
And they licensed it to IBM something like 12 hours before they actually bought it...
MS actually does a surprisingly small amount of development. You see their names associated with a lot of software products, but frequently they're just the publisher, they purchased the product, or they subcontracted out. Take MS's excellent fonts (ah, Verdana, thou art equalled only by Espy Sans upon my screen). Subcontracted. Their wonderful Close Combat war sim series (those games are *great*...if WINE ever supports them fully, I'm going to go nuts) are only published by MS. Bungie made Halo...but they were a company that did incredible stuff and had tons of work on Halo done when Microsoft purchased them. Hotmail was purchased.
Office and Windows, the two core MS products, were both done in-house, however.
And both are among the flakiest products in their lineup.
Also, in response to the people talking about DOS, DOS is still and has been used for some time for a real-time OS. Linux isn't really that great for doing a real-time stuff (well, vanilla Linux isn't great for real-time period) when you have very tight resources available.
It's also still the only way most people let you flash your BIOS...someone needs to make a mini-OS just for that.
DOS is still important in embedded apps (Score:4, Interesting)
If Microsoft really wants to deny new DOS-licenses, this could be a real problem for a couple of companies.
DOS was good (once) (Score:3, Interesting)
I liked DOS on my old machines. You could do amazing things with it, and it would just keep going. Program to snoop passwords on old Netware systems? No problem. Hook up int09, wait for someone to enter 'login' and record the next 30 keystrokes. Want to make a cooperative multitasking system out of it? Took less than two weeks of coding, and basically just involved reprogramming timer frequencies and wrapping int13 and int21 to provide primitive reentrancy. Oh, memory lane is a good place to visit :-)
Win3.1 was fun to play with, but died on me way to often for my liking. Win95 was better, but started to get in the way too much...
Don't get me wrong - I like my Linux box. And my new W2K box at work. I can do fun stuff with them too. I just don't get the same great feeling of control with them, since the OS will NOT move out of the way. Hmm - maybe I should become a kernel hacker instead :-)
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of my old dos programming books have instructions on how to read and write the MSdos disk format directly.
If you did anything 32 bit the general idea was to disable MSdos entirely and getting back to 16 bit was *ugly*
When your apps are doing that many things manually it becomes a limmiting factor and we saw this when the disk formats became too big for the orignal structure and they came up with ugly hacks to extend it. It's also a bit twisted when any app can corrupt the filesystem. 1000 places for possible bugs instead of 1 (the OS).
Still.. it had it's fun times and a part of me will miss programming for it.
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:2, Interesting)
no longer sold or supported, whichever comes later, then that product becomes a part of the public domain"
Command line interface and real-time control gone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe this is off topic but Is there a command line interface available to windows. Yeah I know you can run some comands from the start menu. But is there any sort of scripable command line interface that is analogous to the UNIX terminal prompt?
And what about a real-time interface for controling equipment? Is that now all gone from windows now? Unix was never much good at it (you had to use special pseudo-unix things like vmworks to get true real time interfaces, regular unix just was not built with that in mind)
QEMM!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
-Restil
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:2, Interesting)
MSDOS was never popular. It was ubiquitous. It was ubiquitous because from the very beginning nearly every consumer and business PC shipped with MSDOS installed. So ubiquitous that developers would choose to patch or work around MSDOS altogether rather than consider using any of the much better alternatives available at the time. So ubiquitous that it single-handedly enabled MICROS~1's rise to power despite the terrible quality of the product (not to mention the terrible quality of most MS software from the 80s). So ubiquitous that, if you consider Windows XP to be Microsoft's first non-MSDOS-based consumer OS, it took Microsoft 21 years to ditch it. Competing products never had a chance.
MSDOS was many things, but it was never popular, and it was never good at anything, ever.
Re:Hey, don't knock DOS... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why power users never used it. There were many excellent full-screen file manager tools available. My favorite was PFM.COM (back when .COM meant executable file). Even today
I sometimes miss being able to do a few of
the tricks PFM could do.
Midnight Commander comes close, but since it translates everything through a seriall TTY, it loses the mysterious solid feel that you got by programming directly to the keyboard and screen hardware. It also tries to offload some hard work into bash, so there's a bit of an impedance mismatch between the file manager and the shell beneath it. The old DOS file managers were more monolithic, and therefore felt more unified.
Anyway, with the right tools, I never felt that I was lacking expressive power when running DOS.
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:4, Interesting)
You are lost if you think DOS was not an operating system.
http://howstuffworks.lycoszone.com/operating-sy
Win95 support through YE2003 at least (Score:3, Interesting)
We've never supported 98/ME or NT on the desktop.
We started W2K on the desktop officially last year.
We have no plans to support XP. We will have to spend bucks to get even our bare bones suite of internal apps to run on it.
Does anyone know why the MS alert says XP Pro will have 2 years more life than XP Home?
Re:Ahh the memories... (Score:4, Interesting)
C:/> or $ Sorry DOS wins here. the C: prompt tells me my location. The $ don't. In both cases, of course, you can modify the prompt to be more informative. But the "default" setting dos wins - though not by much.
dir or ls. No winner here both are not obvious what they do if you are newbie.
format C: or mke2fs
And you didn't mention \ vr
Go ahead. Mod me down. I'm not just a Troll. I am OGRE and you better call me "Sir" when you say that.
DOS has some life yet. (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, the whole reason I wrote this is to say that as long as I still have a use for Ghost [symantec.com], I will still have a use for DOS.
Re:MS-DOS wasn't all that bad (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't compare well to Linux or DOS boot disks, but the capability is there. I don't think NT has this, but I bet XP does.
It's not dead on my system! (Score:3, Interesting)
I grew up on DOS systems. In high school it was all we had: WordPerfect 5.1, Borland C++ 2.0, etc. You had to know DOS to get any work done!
DOS had its faults of course but it had many strong points:
1) The command line syntax was clean and easy to learn.
2) The set of commands was small enough to hold in your head. On Unix I often forget the commands for stuff because there are so many of them, and there are a bunch I still haven't learned.
3) Graphics in DOS programs were easy; almost trivial by today's standards.
4) You can play with whatever part of the system you want and not have to jump through hoops. In fact, the hardware course at my U is still using DOS because it's so easy to do hardware programming for.
5) Quick! No multitasking => No overhead.
Dead or not, I'll probably still be using DOS for many years to come.
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:1, Interesting)
> many things to this day for accounting, customer tracking, or other
> important tasks.
I work for an IT firm that used to be really into selling and supporting Point of Sale systems (Touch screens, Cash drawers, Receipt printers, Magnetic card readers, LCD displays on a pole, etc
These all ran on MS-DOS and were networked using LANtastic. It took less than 15 seconds to boot a station, and they almost never crashed.
We still service about 5 or 6 resturaunts from a major chain in Canada that use these systems to this day, with 3+ stations each. They usually only call every year or two when some hardware goes bad.
Re:MS-DOS is dead... (Score:2, Interesting)
will be better DOS. (Score:3, Interesting)
In the tradition of all free software, we will soon see that freeDOS surpasses M$DOS in all ways. Bugs will be fixed, it will take up less space, it will run better. Thanks for the reminder about freeDOS, there's been worlds of improvement since I looked at it a year ago or so.
For some tasks, DOS is the perfect tool. (Score:3, Interesting)
DOS is still (for some tasks) the perfect OS. I've developed a POS-system for cafes (touch screen, water tight, no harddisk, no fan, networking, standalone operation etc) and it all had to fit in 1.44 Mb (standard size of early flash disks). With bartenders turning it off when done..
For some task like that, DOS was/is the perfect tool. Why should you use an bigger tool then the job requires ??
For what I read as the comments, a lot of things are just incorrect...
And there's tons of more things that can be done in DOS.. You'd really be amazed what you can do with it...(Codepages, ANSIS.SYS, Extreme cool memory stuff, DOSKEY, DEBUG, EDLIN etc)
If one would take the time to look into DOS, if can be a very valueable tool for some problems! Nwer doesn;t make the older things less good for a job. And DOS itself NEVER crashed on me!
How to avoid fsckups when flashing BIOS (Score:3, Interesting)
There are two ways that a motherboard or adapter maker can design a BIOS that completely avoids fsckups when being flashed:
Re:Say what you want.... (Score:2, Interesting)
>OS: Operating System
>DOSDisk Operating System
MS-DOS was called QDOS before it was bought by MS, which stood for Quick and Dirty OS.
Dirty is a more apt description, as OSes are primarily dealing with interfaces to the CPU, and MS-DOS had no virtual memory requiring page fault management etc, so using "Disk" to describe the "D" in the acronym is pretty stupid.
Re:Ahh the memories... (Score:2, Interesting)
Software written for when you couldn't count on arrow keys or color displays is still useful for those desparate situations where you need to get in and get SOMETHING to work. I don't even know how you'd try to get into a flaky windows box...