MS-DOS Is 30 Years Old Today 433
An anonymous reader writes "Thirty years ago, on July 27 1981, Microsoft bought the rights for QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for $25,000. QDOS, otherwise known as 86-DOS, was designed by SCP to run on the Intel 8086 processor, and was originally thrown together in just two months for a 0.1 release in 1980 (thus the name). Meanwhile, IBM had planned on powering its first Personal Computer with CP/M-86, which had been the standard OS for Intel 8086 and 8080 architectures at the time, but a deal could not be struck with CP/M's developer, Digital Research. IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few of years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools — and as you can probably tell from the landscape of the computer world today, the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed."
"the partnership worked out rather well" (Score:4, Insightful)
For Microsoft.
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Win for almost everyone... (Score:2)
Sounds like a win to me.
Yes win for MS, win for IBM...shame about us users though, isn't it!
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Yeah all this cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing is terrible for users. We really lost.
Go ahead and predict the past future if things were the way you wanted them if you must, but that's a bankrupt exercise in wish fulfillment.
Hardly a win for IBM (Score:2)
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Yeah, the partnership was so successful that IBM eventually launched it's own OS (OS2) in an attempt to retake the PC market
Given this fact, none of your "points" seem to make sense. IBM was partnering with Microsoft to upgrade DOS to support the protected mode of 286's, and then later 386's, they were not "launching [their] own OS in an attempt to retake the PC market"
You did know that OS/2 1.0 was entirely written by Microsoft, right? Oh.. you didn't? Yeah. Thats why your opinion on these matters means less than nothing. You are ignorant of the facts.
wow (Score:5, Insightful)
what a half assed summary, and it was not the IBM/Microsoft partnership that did shit, its the MS licencing agreement that allowed MS to sell to other people than IBM that made a huge fucking difference when the clones came in and obliterated IBM at their own game
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You're right about the clones and the resulting rise of MS. OTOH, the original IBM PC did do one important thing. It legitimized personal microcomputers in big business. Many large corporations would not allow Apple ][ no matter how badly finance people wanted Visicalc. The IBM name was what made it happen.
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IBM's worth is from much more than PC sales, they kind of do other things, does IBM even make PC's anymore? I know levno or whatever but thats a totally different company now isnt it?
Still in use (Score:2)
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Yep, and it still sucks.
Perhaps the most important lesson I learned in my youth is that marketing beats quality or usability. I remember in 1993 or so, buying a Zip drive to hook up to my Amiga and telling one of my friends about it. His reaction (as a DOS/Windows 3 user) was "where did you get a driver from?" He was gobsmacked to find out that I didn't need one.
Okay, so I'm an old fart, but I'm not going to wax poetic over DOS. I never liked it, because somehow, I saw through the marketing and understo
Re:Still in use (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm an Amiga bigot from waaaay back, too. (My first computer as an adult was an Amiga 1000, or just an Amiga when it was originally sold.).
But as a former frontline flamewarrior, I have to say: It's time to come out of the jungle. We lost that war. Yes, our chosen computer was vastly superior in every way. The difference was that Commodore couldn't sell T-bone steak and potato chips to starving people. Commmodore-brand sushi would be marketed under the tagline "The best cold, dead raw fish you've ever had!".
Superior marketing always wins. That's the lesson here, Amiga Persecution Complex notwithstanding.
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Oh, yeah, I agree with you 100%. I'm currently a hard-core Linux lover, though I have got to say that I miss the days of being able to write scripts that could prompt for a needed resource just by referring to the resource. That was a wicked nice touch in the OS. On the other hand, I don't miss the incessant click-click-click of the floppy drive, and I would say that in the last decade, PC technology caught up with where the Amiga was in the early 90's, and has since surpassed it.
Note, though, getting ba
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The difference was that Commodore couldn't sell T-bone steak and potato chips to starving people.
The difference is Commodore spent their marketing budget (and R&D budget) paying their CEO a stupid salary.
Old Computers (Score:3)
I bought an Amiga 1000 on 26-Jul-86
7 years earlier I had bought my first computer (a TRS80)
In 1980 I bought my 2nd computer, that one had color, a disk drive and a keyboard with 117 keys (Compucolor II )
I didn't buy an MS-DOS machine until 1994
The machine I used the longest was an Amiga B2000 1988 to 2002 (I sold it because I left the country, it was still going at the time)
And to those people that say I am old, I'd just like to point out that I work with people who are 50 years older than me.
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You'd better be calling The Good Lord for help right now, because while you weren't looking specialized chips like that DID become the dominant [nvidia.com] platform [amd.com], and GPGPU is going to make it more so. The primary processor (which is also from a duopoloy) will just become a system management hypervisor.
Read up on the technological cycle of reincarnation. [catb.org] "All this has happened before. All this will happen again."
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I dunno, the Amiga had its HAM graphics modes which could do 4096 simultaneous colours. The fact that the graphics output had the same refresh rate as TV was pretty awesome too, and sold quite a few Amigas to TV studios.
NES had superior animation? Maybe there is some spec buried in the NES datasheets that's superior. In the real world however, I propose that th only way the Amiga could fail against a NES is if it wasn't switched on ;-)
Tha Atari had better music _software_ but MIDI itself is pretty much just
Half-baked at best, wrong at worst... (Score:4, Informative)
Its audio was trumped by machines such as the Apple IIgs (16 channel wavetable) and the Atari ST (best MIDI software and capabilities.)
Don't know much about the Apple IIGS' audio, but it sounds interesting (no pun intended) (*)
But the Atari ST? Please. The ST became popular for music because it had MIDI ports built-in. (**) Credit to Atari for their foresight, but nothing that the Amiga couldn't do with a dirt-cheap add-on interface. The sound from an expensive synth attached to an Atari ST sounded better than the Amiga's built-in sound? No shit!
Especially ironic given the Amiga's built-in sound *was* damned impressive for the time (***), whereas the ST's own sound chip was an off-the-shelf 3-channel square-wave job [wikipedia.org] dating back to the 8-bit era that was exceptionally poor in comparison.
Its graphics were again trumped by machines like the Apple IIgs (4096 simultaneous colors.)
You're showing your blatant ignorance here.
The Amiga was well-known for its 4096 colour HAM mode. [wikipedia.org]. Pixel constraints limited its usefulness for animation and games, but it was impressive for static graphics.
The Apple IIGS's graphics [wikipedia.org] look good, but are- as far as I can see- essentially 16-colour (320 x 200) and 4-colour (640 x 200) modes with hardware support for palette switching. The Amiga's copper co-processour could comfortably perform the same trick in its regular (non-HAM) flexible 32-colour (320 x 200) (****) and 4-colour (640 x 200) modes with the same or greater flexibility.
The nintendo had better animation capabilities than the Amiga, and they both came out the same year (1985.)
Are you seriously claiming that the original 8-bit NES was more powerful than the Amiga? Mind you, given your apparent ignorance of the Amiga's 4096 colour graphics capability, I wouldn't put too much store in your judgement on this matter.
(*) If I had time, I'd be interested in how the "wavetable" synthesis performed versus the Amiga's "real" 4-channel, 8-bit sound, but I do admit the Apple II seems like it ought to be impressive by the standards of the time.
(**) And possibly because the ST was more affordable early on, until the Amiga 500 came out and its price fell.
(***) Maybe the Apple IIGS was as well, doesn't mean they weren't both impressive.
(****) Actually, there was a "64-colour" mode, but the second 32 colours were "half-brite" versions of the first 32, so I don't really count that.
Re:In some places... (Score:2)
Yeah, mostly on Linux boxes by old-fart gamers who need it to play Lode Runner [wikipedia.org] or some other "legacy" diversion.
Re:Still in use (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Still in use (Score:4, Funny)
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FreeDOS has an awesome use. BIOS updates often run only under windows or under DOS, and that can be a problem for a GNU/Linux or BSD box. Two days ago I updated my BIOS by putting the .EXE on a FreeDOS CD-R.
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Still being developed.... Just search for FreeDOS and then shake your head in disgust.....
Sorry that you aren't as enthusiastic about it as we are.
Yes, we're still working on FreeDOS. In fact, if you visit our web site [freedos.org] you'll see that we are currently working on the FreeDOS 1.1 distribution. We're almost there! After that is out, we'll start the discussion for what FreeDOS "2.0" should be, what a modern DOS should look like in 2011.
So yes, we are still doing some work there.
I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0 (Score:3)
I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0... They added subdirectories (folders)! what a concept.
I still occasionally boot up machines with MSDOS v6.22 ... in order to run my copy of WordPerfect v5.1 :-)
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Yes v6.2 rocked! You could run in compressed mode and double your likelihood of catastrophic data loss!
FTFY. Doublespace was playing craps every second of every day of your life and hoping you don't ever crap out.
Hard disks were expensive, but I learned early on: delete your own unneeded data, or let Doublespace delete everything.... your choice.
And talking about Doublespace/Drivespace... brings up (A) one of the earliest examples of Microsoft playing dirty pool with prospective partners, and (B)(to my re
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The jump was from PC/DOS 1.1 to 2.0. 1.0 was very short lived.
Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0 (Score:4, Interesting)
And just remember how WordPerfect 5.1 met all your word processing needs in less than 640k, while OpenOffice writer needs 640M to do it.
United Way (Score:5, Informative)
IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few of years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools
I think that IBM was 'approached' by MS. Gates' mother had contacts through her role as a high ranking official in the United Way. That got Bill a foot in the door and he made good on the opportunity. Major successes are often a convergence of skill, ambition and blind luck, and the MS fortune is, I think, one of those cases.
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Major successes are often a convergence of skill, ambition and blind luck
And a woman to open doors. I know this is Slashdot, but there's a reason behind every successful man is a woman. True to geekdom, for Bill Gates, it was his mother.
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Whatever you say Oedipus.
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The reason that IBM was willing to trust this kid was because his Mom worked with the CEO of IBM on the United Way board. Of course the other reason IBM was willing to work with MS was because they were in the middle of a big
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IBM was doing business with an already established partner when they contracted Microsoft for an OS.
Microsoft Dirty Operating System (Score:4, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Worked out well? (Score:3, Insightful)
and as you can probably tell from the landscape of the computer world today, the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed.
Worked out well for who? Microsoft? Okay, true. IBM? Nope. You and I? Nope. Other than a few pockets at MS, who did it work out well for?
Re:Worked out well? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I remember when I was a kid, the computer world was very fragmented. Apple was incompatible with Atari was incompatible with Commodore was incompatible with IBM. Need I mention the other minor players, such as Franklin, Acorn, TI, Sinclair, etc.? Great game came out? Odds are it won't run on the system that YOU have. As much as I generally dislike the major players, at least there are only three major platforms that you have to develop for. In fact, you can develop a game for only one market, and still have the opportunity to make quite a bit of money.
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Well, I remember when I was a kid, the computer world was very fragmented. Apple was incompatible with Atari was incompatible with Commodore was incompatible with IBM.
...but for serious business computing, long before MS-DOS, there was CP/M, which ran on hardware from many different manufacturers. As a kid, you didn't want one (a) because you couldn't afford it and (b) the cheaper, fragmented systems had cool things like sound and colour graphics. It was, however, sufficiently important that you could even buy Z80-based second processors for 6502 systems like the Apple and BBC Micro to run CP/M. By that time, device-independent graphics libraries for CP/M were cropping
Dang (Score:2)
This makes me feel old...
inevitable joke (Score:3)
C:\dos\run
run\dos\run
DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome. (Score:3)
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OS/2 was cool, and more than a loader
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OS/2 was the first real OS I used. Later I "upgraded" to windows, as forced by my employer. What a major step backwards, especially in usability and reliability.
I still remember when our OS/2 server was forcefully migrated to NT. Some bonehead left the CDROM drive open and had shared the drive. Later, when someone attempted to access the shared CDROM drive, the entire server hung waiting for someone physically in front of the computer to acknowledge the drive was inaccessible. Once someone clicked OKAY, the
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the first OS/2 was command line only, with very DOS-like commands.
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Rather well for whom ? (Score:2)
...the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed.
Well for whom ? Bill Gates, sure. IBM wasn't very happy with it by the end. The rest of us...
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are still trying to figure out how to get our TSRs to use himem so that we can play our games.
Pretty sure summary is incorrect (Score:2)
MS did not own QDOS when they sold it to IBM. Oh, and Bill Gate's mother was on the board of IBM. And what a crap OS DOS was; it held the industry back 10 years. Thankfully MS no longer has that sort of power; you could tell they were slipping when they failed to smother the Internet and force everybody onto MSN. Now, the only real drag they can impose on progress is via patent shakedowns.
Worked out well? (Score:5, Insightful)
Worked out well? In what sense did it work out well? Economically for Microsoft and IBM? Perhaps. For the rest of the world that suffers working under the decrepit POS that is Windows OS? Not so much. IMNSHO, DOS was a terrific mistake and its adoption 30 years ago has directly hindered the development of the computer industry.
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For the rest of the world there is Linux.
took half that time to catch up to UNIX (Score:2)
IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least. (Score:4, Insightful)
By introducing such a lame technology like the IBM PC and MS DOS, IBM/Microsoft set back the IT industry 20 years or more.
We could have 32 bit machines with GUI, preemptive multitasking and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics much earlier.
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We already had all of those things prior to the release of the PC. Expensive as all hell at the time, though.
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I had an Amiga in 1985 with all that except 2D instead of 3D. There were viable alternatives to DOS - and those of us happily using them laughed at the little single-tasking green screens with their beeps and text interfaces - but all of them but MacOS fell by the wayside for various reasons.
Anybody know why DR couldn't seal the deal? (Score:2)
yay for Copyright ...not (Score:3)
Re:Cue a gazillion posts... (Score:4, Funny)
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I think I still have some MS-DOS 4.01 floppies somewhere. I should probably burn them to let the demons out.
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I'm an older fart than you. I think my first was 3.2.
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Haha! I got you all beat! My first DOS Version was just called 'Ugh'.
That was the one where you had to extinguish the little flaming torches that were used as memory indicators with your fingers, right?
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who's depressed? The PC under CP/M would have been a better thing, as zcpr and other goodies added.
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Hell yeah!
If only CP/M-86 had even gotten into the x86 OS race... the things that might have been.
OTOH, we'd probably be complaining about Digital Re$earch's current anti-free-software FUD campaign and using the Gary Kildall borg icon.
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we'd be running on Alpha chips!
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*shrugs* I type "ls" into a Dos box often enough that I created an alias for it on my work system... :)
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Yes... and I have probably the worst possible reasons for wishing CP/M became the default OS on IBM PC. 1. I hate using the backslash for anything other than escape character sequences in programming. 2. I hate the idea of drive letters! Holy crap what a bad idea that was.
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Yes, I know CP/M also had drive letters too... still. CP/M did it better.
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Damn, I'm old. I remember personal computers before IBM threw their hat in the ring. I lusted after microprocessors and blinking lights in an 8-bit world.
I'm so old I actually bought one of the SCP board sets (my first computer purchase! I could not resist the lure of 16-bit power), an S-100 mainframe kit, and started soldering.
My system came with DOS version 0.10, serial number 11 on an 8" 256K soft sector floppy (for my Cromemco 4FDC running a Persci 277 dual floppy drive).
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I remember reading the MS-DOS guide when we got our first Compaq computer (I think 2nd grade). Boy was that bland. And then when I switched to UNIX style all the commands were messed up!
I'm 26 though, so not quite an old fart yet.
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Hold your tongue, ya young whippersnapper!
And respect your elders, ya peppy little spit-f*ck. (paraphrasing line to Zuckerberg-like character in Zombieland)
Revised title: "MS-DOS would have been 30 if it were still alive today".
A recent load of FreeDOS in a VM worked great. The larger download came with tons of cool software too, but so far Tetris is about the only thing easy to identify from the DOS filename. Sigh... (everything was identified with descriptions when installed, but we old fossils can't
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ms-dos with netbeui is still in use in some shitty but unkillable P.O.S. system, some old automation monitoring system and a countless list of old but supported embedded system so it is still alive. Unless you meant alive == Microsoft supported
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A recent load of FreeDOS in a VM worked great. The larger download came with tons of cool software too, but so far Tetris is about the only thing easy to identify from the DOS filename. Sigh... (everything was identified with descriptions when installed, but we old fossils can't remember much stuff like that an hour later)
And you may be interested to know that FreeDOS is still being developed. We're working on a FreeDOS 1.1 distribution (mostly an update to the 1.0 distribution, plus a few noticeable cha
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I hope will see a "modernization" of what a DOS system should look like in 2011.
Inquiring minds want to know whether we'll get a GUI version of debug.com. ~
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Re:Cue a gazillion posts... (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary is technically incorrect. Near the end it states that Microsoft had years under its belt with MS-DOS and Basic. The mistake in the summary is that they had years of experience with MS-DOS--that didn't even exist as a product at the time.
It had years under its belt with Basic which was written initially by stealing Harvard computing power (Paul Allen wasn't a student and Gates was just a deadbeat about his classes, none of which at the time were computer related). And the language itself was a rip off of the language invented by two other professors from a different school.
Years earlier, as kids, Gates and Allen both had been in trouble with the law for hacking and stealing time-share minutes. Back then those were significant costs to anyone using them. Instead of being prosecuted they were hired to test for faults and weaknesses in security.
It was Allen who knew of the SCP QDOS. Gates essentially lied to IBM knowing that he could gain control of QDOS. In Microsoft taking over QDOS, SCP retained rights to any and all changes made by Microsoft, and were owed royalties. Microsoft failed to pay those and SCP owner who was going bankrupt sued Microsoft and won. He paid his debts and had a little left for retirement. MS-DOS wasn't created till after IBM-DOS had been out for some time.
So, they stole computing time from private companies and were forgiven for being so brilliant. Then later they were to steal computing time again, knowing it was illegal, from Harvard, to write an emulator for the 8086 instruction set so they could write their version of Basic which was stolen from two professors from another major university. They then used that to make a company (pirates benefiting commercially from their theft), and in the process Gates tried to screw Allen by, during his convalescence where he nearly died, by getting Ballmer to connive to gain control of his stock. And, during the negotiation process of deciding how to split the shares upon creation of the new business, Gates decried Allen because he'd become an employee of MITS and thus apparently deserved fewer shares, when after then agreement about the split, a few weeks (months) later, Gates was also an employee of MITS. Then, Gates and Allen had the gall to write open letters to others about stealing software. The reality is, that Gates and Allen had stolen considerable sums by then.
Re:Cue a gazillion posts... (Score:5, Funny)
C:\OFFLAWN.COM
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Re:Cue a gazillion posts... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hi,
/P to page it).
Speaking as an "old fart", I can say that, while this is funny, you obviously aren't an old-school DOS user.
If you were typing that from a DOS prompt on an old PC, you'd enter it as:
\offlawn
Few people had more than one hard drive back then, so your default drive would be C:, eliminating the need to specify the drive letter. Then, you'd leverage DOS' internal processing of commands: It would look for internal commands first, then look for external commands. When extensions weren't specified, it would look for executables as follows: COM first, then EXE and then BAT.
Since OFFLAWN.COM apparently exists in your example, you'd save typing another four characters just by knowing this.
Now, with regards to the location of OFFLAWN.COM? Nobody I knew would ever fill up the root of C: with files - there was a limit to the number of files and directories that could exist in the root, after all, and if you reached it, you'd get an out of space error once you tried to create another.
In addition, given the fact that a standard DOS screen was 80 by 25, you'd want to limit a DIR display, so as to avoid having to pipe the output (later, use
The approach that I used was this: The root of C: was limited to COMMAND.COM, AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, the hidden system files, and subdirectories (what you young folk call "folders" these days) in which you'd store programs and data.
Since there were also limitations on the length of the path, I'd make the names of subdirectories that I wanted included in it short, too.
My usual approach ended up in a path similar to this:
C:\BAT;C:\BIN;C:\DOS;
BAT contained my batch files. BIN contained DOS utilities that enhanced or replaced similar DOS commands and DOS contained DOS, of course.
Doing this kept the path small, reduced the time to search it, and also ensured that DOS would search for executables the way that *I* wanted it to.
I wrote BAT files to start all of my programs, you see, and so putting them all in C:\BAT would ensure that they would be found and run first. Most were simple: Change to the directory where the program was installed, run it, and then return to the root of C: once it exited.
Since this path leveraged the way DOS processed commands running WordStar from a command line was as easy as typing ws from anywhere and pressing enter, without having to actually have the directory where WS.COM resided in the path, nor having to be in a specific subdirectory in order to avoid the dreaded "Bad command or filename".
Finally, given the organization I just explained, OFFLAWN.COM would be in C:\BIN, and so, all you'd need to do to run it would be type: offlawn (DOS converted all input to uppercase, after all, so why waste time pressing the Shift key?).
And so I close by saying this:
offlawn
*grin*
Regards,
dj
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Those were the good old days. I remember my first computer as a kid. A true 8086 with a color CGA monitor and a 20mb hard disk and 2 x 5 1/2" floppy drives. Big pimpin' in those days.
Color? You're indeed a child, grasshopper. Hell, we didn't have displays when I was a kid. Just teletypes. And we liked them (the dots from the punch tape were fun).
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And that's how Bill Gates knew the road to success was NOT building a better mousetrap, it was about distribution and critical mass. There were lots of "better things" at the time. It didn't happen because the people already had DOS. Not "better" but good enough and no one could tell the majority anything different. And things haven't changed that much in that regard -- lots of better things and not enough people using them.
Fortunately, there is Linux on most devices these days.
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The "right way" (Score:2)
One of mine said you have to declare any number you use as a constant in the beginning, and that means any number. If he saw a number used in your code, points taken off.
That meant "x*2" to double something once in your whole program was bad. You had to declare a constant in the beginning called "double" or some such, and then make it "x*double". A reasonably good practice taken to the absurd extreme.
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And in any language or runtime that doesn't semantically provide for constants (i.e, they're protected from change)... well, use of named "constants" in those environments is the root of the phrase "constants aren't."
One careless assignment and all of a sudden "one" isn't 1 any more. Kinda explodes arithmetic.
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Those that can do; those that can't teach.
You get that in any field where the pay is poor for the hours worked. Teachers end up getting singled out because everybody thinks they know how to teach when in reality it's another set of skills that you're being expected to master on top of the ones that are required to have knowledge of the field. And trust me, it isn't easy to get somebody that has years of experience in a particular specialty, knowledge of the necessary pedagogy and is still willing to work for peanuts with little to no job security e
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The reason Microsoft is still the favored desktop OS is probably linux taking forever to get its shit together and create a user-focused OS like Ubuntu, giving Microsoft all the time it needed to create Windows 7. I remember well the many attempts I made with earlier linuxes, only to be disappointed each and every time because shit just didn't work. Ubuntu is a breeze these days, sure, but that's too little, too late.
It has little to do with a good UI (look at the most popular OS on the planet, XP) - it has all to do with developers, developers, developers. That and Active Directory. Take away the need for commercial programs to require XP and come up with a good replacement for AD and then figure out how to support all that and Microsoft loses it's grip. Since that combination of factors is rather unlikely, Microsoft will be with us for a long while.
I expect to see XP running in the nursing home my wife stuffs me
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eh, there is and has been windows versions for mobile and embedded devices, with more being developed. Windows Mobile 7 will support ARMv7. In a not totally unrelated aside, notice how many IT wares are at version "7" to ape Microsoft?
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screw that, go to OS/2 1.2, you'll be much happier and have much more functionality. The torrents are out there!
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DOS was never intended to be a huge and all-powerful operating system. it was designed for the machines of the time
Compared to operating systems for other machines of the time, DOS still sucked.
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I remember accidentally typing: del . and then instantly deeply regretting having hit the wrong key when it wiped out the entire filesystem.