DOS: Reasons to prefer it above Windowz

[Predator]

I like to think if you're gonna be doing basic programming and text operatoins DOS would be the best choice. Straightforward and quick and effecient. BEEEEEYOUTEEFOOL

[Aloone_Jonez]

I fine the DOS command line interface easier to use than BASH, even though BASH is meant to be more powerful. DOS is very small and it is great for simple programs where you don

[Aloone_Jonez]

Wine and DOSEMU can run DOS programs under Linux but I don't know which does a better job. I'm going to install both, and then see for myself.

Has any one else used DOS programs under these computability layers, and if so are they any good?

I would like to run COMMAND.COM for now until I get more used to BASH, will Wine or DOSEMU let you do this?

[WMD]

If you look deeply into it, you'd realize that DOS is pretty awful.

Reliability.  It seemed good on that front, but only because it ran one app at a time.  If you tried to run DOS Shell and multitask with it, it was horrible.

Memory Management.  It's real mode, it works with 640k of program memory and needed multiple kludges to work any better (UMA, HMA).  Only way around it was a software protected mode driver (which was only so good).

Drivers.  If you install MS-DOS 6.2 (1993), by default these things won't work:
mouse
CD-ROM
sound
video (beyond hardware VESA)

So, you were stuck doing nothing on there until you found drivers and loaded them all.  There were none included.

Command line.  The DOS prompt was pretty weak, and with no work done on it in ages, it can't do much of anything.

Linux, QNX, and others can scale down pretty well to 4MB RAM, since it'd be stripped down a lot on an embedded system.  DOS doesn't have much of a purpose anymore.

[ August 19, 2004: Message edited by: WMD ]

[Aloone_Jonez]

I'm talking about FreeDOS, MS-DOS sucks.

FreeDOS in good for embedded systems, and it's good secutiry wise, I haven't tried this but if you have a non-winmodem and boot into a FAT32 partition and then use a DOS web browser, if you get infected all you do is reformat and reinstall and as DOS is so small it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.

DOS shell was shit there are better multi taskers around, and a DOS extender is a must, 640k of memory in 64k blocks was shit in 1994 and it's fucking terrible today.

[WMD]

quote:Originally posted by Aloone:
I'm talking about FreeDOS, MS-DOS sucks.

How does FreeDOS solve the problems?

 

quote:I haven't tried this but if you have a non-winmodem and boot into a FAT32 partition and then use a DOS web browser, if you get infected all you do is reformat and reinstall and as DOS is so small it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.

1.  Reformatting sucks.  Inconvenient no matter what, especially since DOS requires lots of drivers (like, for every app that needs them, except for mouse.  There isn't a hardware access API).
2.  DOS exploits?    

 

quote:DOS shell was shit there are better multi taskers around

There's no hardware memory protection in a 16-bit OS.  It's going to suck regardless.

 

quote:and a DOS extender is a must

Not sure what this does.  I know some apps would load these to use extended memory, like that thing Quake came with.  Is that what you mean?
 

quote:640k of memory in 64k blocks was shit in 1994 and it's fucking terrible today.

I know of 640k memory, but 64k blocks?  Always acted like one block to me, with stuff in it.  Unless I'm misunderstanding you.

[ August 19, 2004: Message edited by: WMD ]

[Aloone_Jonez]

quote:Originally posted by WMD:

How does FreeDOS solve the problems?

FreeDOS is faster and more reliable than MS-DOS.

 

quote:Originally posted by WMD:

1. Reformatting sucks. Inconvenient no matter what, especially since DOS requires lots of drivers (like, for every app that needs them, except for mouse. There isn't a hardware access API).

If you can put a full free dos install plus a web browser on a 20MB partition reformating is very quick. If you have a copy of your dos installation plust wen browser on a NTFS drive all you would have to do is reformat your FAT partition and copy your installation to it, and then make it bootable or you could use a boot disk.


 

quote:Originally posted by WMD:

2. DOS exploits?

As DOS can't access your NTFS partition if DOS fucks up it won't fuck your Windows install.

 

quote:Originally posted by WMD:

There's no hardware memory protection in a 16-bit OS. It's going to suck regardless.

True.

But if you run decent software it shouldn't be a problem.

I remember using Win95 in DOS mode because Windows was too unstable, the only problem with DOS is when it fucks up it locks up and you need to reboot. A DOS extender partly will solve this problem too.

DOS EXTENDER
 

quote:Originally posted by WMD:

Not sure what this does. I know some apps would load these to use extended memory, like that thing Quake came with. Is that what you mean?

A DOS extender is a piece of software that can either be add on to your program after it has been compiled or a tsr. A DOS extender allows DOS to run in 32-bit protected mode, its an OS extention that also includes a 32-bit memory manager. Some DOS extenders include Win32 API emulation, this enables 32 bit Windows console programs to be run under plain DOS.

WDOSX
HX DOS extender

 

quote:Originally posted by WMD:

I know of 640k memory, but 64k blocks?  Always acted like one block to me, with stuff in it.  Unless I'm misunderstanding you.

DOS uses real mode whitch is split up into 64k segments, protected mode can access all the memory as one potentialy 4GB block.

It's getting late and I'm too tired to explain protected/real mode to you, so I hope these links will be of some help to you:
http://www.x86.org/articles/pmbasics/tspec_a1_doc.htm
http://my.execpc.com/~geezer/os/pm.htm
http://www.internals.com/articles/protmode/introduction.htm

[ August 19, 2004: Message edited by: Aloone ]

[WMD]

quote:If you can put a full free dos install plus a web browser on a 20MB partition reformating is very quick. If you have a copy of your dos installation plust wen browser on a NTFS drive all you would have to do is reformat your FAT partition and copy your installation to it, and then make it bootable or you could use a boot disk.

That's all true, but I'd assume you have some of your own data on there too.

 

quote:As DOS can't access your NTFS partition if DOS fucks up it won't fuck your Windows install.

Not the response I was looking for...I meant, are there any exploits that can actually affect DOS anymore?

 

quote:A DOS extender is a piece of software that can either be add on to your program after it has been compiled or a tsr. A DOS extender allows DOS to run in 32-bit protected mode, its an OS extention that also includes a 32-bit memory manager. Some DOS extenders include Win32 API emulation, this enables 32 bit Windows console programs to be run under plain DOS.

Ok, we're talking about the same thing.  Really only that one program runs in protected mode, since it starts when the app does and quits when the app does.  That's really all it does, no multitask capability...but RAM was really the problem, so ok.

 

quote:DOS uses real mode whitch is split up into 64k segments, protected mode can access all the memory as one potentialy 4GB block.

When you first mentioned these blocks, I was reminded of DOS's use of upper memory blocks: if you loaded a 40k driver, the whole block was still used.  I don't think the conventional memory did that - DOS always treated it like a 640k block, it never had to leave parts empty due to it being blocks.  Reason I bring all this up is that you mentioned the 64k blocks as if they caused their own problem.  The problem is just 640k vs. all memory.

[Predator]

Wow, you guys really know your OSses hey. Is the freedos really better than the original?            My basic point about preferring DOS to Windows is that Windows gives you too much crap. All the PCs I have worked on, etc. DOS gave me way less crap than Windows. Any PC that I have to patch up, always a problem caused by Windows.

[pandronic]

I was for many years a DOS programmer and actually gave up programming when Winslows came into the scene.

What I liked about DOS was its simplicity ... if you wanted something you had to program it yourself. You didn't have to rely on badly written APIs or be confined by the OS.

I long for the times when one person could write any kind of application. Now, for example, it takes a few hundred people and a budget of a few million bucks just to write crappy 3D games.

[WMD]

quote:What I liked about DOS was its simplicity ... if you wanted something you had to program it yourself. You didn't have to rely on badly written APIs or be confined by the OS.

This is true somewhat...the latest Windoze keylogger is 100k, 85k of that in DLLs.  To log keystrokes.  :rolleyes:

But, this got really bad for some programs.  There was no printing API, so all apps needed their own drivers.  Same for high-res video, sound, what have you.  THAT was a mess.

[bedouin]

Hmm, this thread brings back memories of buying the newest games, knowing on the ride home I'd be awaiting an additional 2 hours of autoexec.bat and config.sys tweaking/bootdisk creation before it would even work.

If you ever ran a BBS you will have some sort of DOS nostalgia, no matter how repugnant the experience actually was.  It's kind of like battered women's syndrome.

[pandronic]

quote:Originally posted by WMD:
But, this got really bad for some programs.  There was no printing API, so all apps needed their own drivers.  Same for high-res video, sound, what have you.  THAT was a mess.

True, except for the mouse. The CD-ROM drivers worked on top of MSCDEX. Also there weren't big problems with hires video if you had a VESA 1.2/2.0 compliant card. Most of the sound cards were SB compliant so all you had to do was to set the port, DMA and IRQ in autoexec.bat.

I agree it's a mess and to sell such a product is something only Microsoft can do, but you had the power to fully control your OS and your computer. Now you have to go where your OS tells you to go (Windows more, Linux less, but still ...)

[Aloone_Jonez]

Yes, mono-tasking operating systems are cool, they let your programs have all the resources to play with, single tasking OS is best suited to games, embedded systems and batch processing.

How can a crappy 400MHz game console run better games than an 1GHz PC running Linux?

Because it has a very small and compact-mono tasking operating system.

An OS like DOS has the potential to be a great for gaming, the only problems are drivers and the lack of a standard graphics API. If it were possible to write a standard API and port drivers for the latest accelerated 3D graphics and sound cards to FreeDOS, then DOS could be the next big thing. Come to think of it DOS is so small it could be on the same CD as the game, all you would have to do is boot from the CD and the game would automatically load there could be a problem with saving games though.

[insomnia]

NO NO NO ...
DOS really does suck.
It always was (and is) a kiddy toy.

Ps: So YES, even NT is a lot better.

[ August 21, 2004: Message edited by: insomnia ]