Miscellaneous > The Lounge
MS wasn't always bad...
dbl221:
Well as far as the command line thing goes DOS was a pale imitation of Unix. Get your self a copy of Linux, install KSH93 with vi as command line editor of choice and you are set. DOS is a crappy 16bit OS with no TCP/IP stack....I mean why would you use that.
Centurian:
Hey,
I have to agree with Hector to a degree. Dos was awesome.
When Windows 3.1 was a big thing a friend of mine and I decided to run a test. We chose 4 specific jobs (1. creating a directory and copying files over to it, 2. connecting to a bbs and downloading a file, 3. writing a letter and printing it, 4. adding up a group of nubers and returning a total) and we both did them on the same 20mhz 386 w/1 meg of ram. I did everything in dos while he did it in windows 3.1. We wanted to see how windows compared to dos. Dos won. If I remember correctly it took me 12 minutes to do all these tasks separately in Dos. It took 14 or 15 minutes to do them in Windows 3.1 but he was doing everything at once. Today that test would no longer work because multi-tasking is much better now than it used to be.
IMHO Dos 5.0 was the best dos but all dos versions were great.
However Hector you have no right to decide who may or may not use a computer. Today OS's are more user friendly true but that does not mean that people are idiots today. It just means things are getting easier.
quote:Garden Gnome said
Did you seriously like the days of DOS, having to spend hours setting up simple things like a modem, things that takes seconds to do in any modern OS these days, including Linux? Did you enjoy it how every program had to have its own separate set of drivers to work?
--- End quote ---
WTF who ever heard of taking hours to set up a modem? It was very simple. Read the doc that came with the modem (5 mins), set the dip switches on the modem (1 min), install the modem (5 min), copy a driver to your hard disk (1 min), add a line or 2 to your config.sys and or autoexec.bat (2 min). Yes that would take about 15 minutes but no way would it take hours. The same is true for a printer or whatever else you wanted to install. I suppose though for people who could not comprehend what they read or those who did not read the docs it could take longer but that was very rare. Most people have the common sense to read the docs.
As for drivers for programs, most good programs had their own drivers included or used the dos drivers that were set up on the system. Word Perfect is a good example of this, with WP5.0 you could use the included drivers for your printer or you could have WP search your environment and pick up your installed printer.
About the only real problem with drivers was video drivers at the time. Most programs used video modes like MCGA. If you ever did any programming you would know it was easy.
mov al,13h
mov ah,0
int 10h
Then define the screen address as A000h and your in business on any vga compatible monitor. Make an array the size of the screen to point to the screen address load your images to the array and flip them to the screen. Nothing to it. Or you could go direct to the screen without using an array.
The one I show above is the very simple MCGA mode. 320X200 256 color resolution, single page. There was also ModeX 320X200 256 color 4 pages , ModeY 320X240 256 color 3 pages, etc.
So you did not have a highres 16,24 or 32 bit depth graphics. But you could do things with graphics then that you can't imagine doing now like a 4 way fade to black and back to the image. Some truly awesome stuff. Hell you could make it appear you were doing a hundred way fade if you wanted just by what pages you were displaying at what part of the screen. Simple but fancy stuff that is impossible to do today.
All in all though Dos kicked ass.
voidmain:
I used to run a two node BBS using PC-Board under DOS, multitasking with DesqView. DesqView was pretty cool at the time. It was the second largest BBS in the state at the time. This was pre Win 3.0. I handled MetroLink and Fido news feeds, which was similar to news groups on the Internet today. I remember ditching my C64 for a Tandy 1000 with DOS 3.2 and I was in heaven. Of course this was shortly before I got turned on to UNIX and the Internet (which is nothing like it is today). DOS was good to me, it's when I started getting heavily into programming using Turbo Pascal and Borland C. But when I moved to UNIX I was like a kid in a candy store, and still am 12 years later.
Centurian:
Hey,
quote:Originally posted by VoidMain:
I used to run a two node BBS using PC-Board under DOS, multitasking with DesqView. DesqView was pretty cool at the time. It was the second largest BBS in the state at the time. This was pre Win 3.0. I handled MetroLink and Fido news feeds, which was similar to news groups on the Internet today. I remember ditching my C64 for a Tandy 1000 with DOS 3.2 and I was in heaven. Of course this was shortly before I got turned on to UNIX and the Internet (which is nothing like it is today). DOS was good to me, it's when I started getting heavily into programming using Turbo Pascal and Borland C. But when I moved to UNIX I was like a kid in a candy store, and still am 12 years later.
--- End quote ---
DesqView was nice. I still wonder why it never went anywhere.
I used to read\post to Fido all the time. Particularly the pascal feed.
WOOOHOOO a Tandy 1000 I have not even thought about those in years. I never actually owned a Tandy but several friends had them. My first system was an 8088 w/640k of ram and a CGA monitor. Oh yeah and back then 1200bps on a modem was screaming.
voidmain:
Yeah, if I remember correctly the Tandy 1000TX (the model I had) had 640K of RAM (I believe the other 1000s had 512K. I recall it would run in 4 and 8 Mhz modes (8 was Turbo mode). And I think it was roughly a 286 processor, or was it an 8088? When I started my BBS I was running 1200 baud modems, then upped to 2400 and then upped to 9600 when they came out, then quit shortly after when I moved. I had upgraded to the super large 80MB Seagate hard drive that just hit the market (after running two $500 20MB Tandy hard drives). And installed a Perstore controller board which boosted the capacity of the Seagate to about 150MB. This put me in second place in the state for largest disk capacity of a BBS.
Somewhere along the line the 386 machines came out and I built my own speed demon. It was "lightning fast" and I couldn't imagine computers ever needing to be more powerul than that. Of course Bill Gates blew that theory with the release of Windows 3.x. And on it went. It was amazing how fast programs could run when they weren't bloated with the extra fat.
And I found this link with a picture of the old 1000TX:
http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/trs1000.htm
[ March 18, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version