The end of commercial DOS?

[mobrien_12]

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1558309,00.asp

 

quote:Excerpt from the Article
"DOS is what it is," said Sparks. "We're not looking to add substantial features to it, as we're at the point of diminishing returns

[WMD]

quote:The primary new feature of the 8.0 release is FAT32/large-partition support,

FINALLY!!!! \\\\\O/////  

Still, no real reason to stick with DOS anymore, unless you wanna run some 286 and below, and *maybe* 386/486 (though Linux runs on that too).

As much as it sucks, it's sad to see it go.  

[hm_murdock]

The two old Nemeses are dead.

Mac OS 9.2.2 in 2001 was the last release of the classic Mac OS, and now it seems that DOS has seen its last commercial release.

May they rest in peace.

[DrDoog]

but didn't Wengier's MS-DOS 7.10 cut have FAT32 for a couple of years?

LONG LIVE DOS

[WMD]

Oops, you're right, MSDOS did have FAT32 support.  But then again, MSDOS 7.1 wasn't really a DOS release, it was just the DOS part of Win9x.

[preacher]

dos has been dead for years. In a while there won't even be too many legacy systems running it.

[KernelPanic]

quote:Originally posted by WMD:
Oops, you're right, MSDOS did have FAT32 support.  But then again, MSDOS 7.1 wasn't really a DOS release, it was just the DOS part of Win9x.

Yeah the last real MS-DOS was 6.22 (I think)

[M51DPS]

I think that if DOS was really dead, no one would use FreeDOS.

[Calum]

freeDOS certainly isn't and shouldn't be dead. although FreeDOS should look into supporting fat32 and possibly ext2 filesystems.

FreeDOS really is like a proper GNU operating system. conceptually i think it is as much GNU as Linux is, although it is only an 8 bit system so the two can't be seriously compared for functionality.

a LOT of things only need an 8 bit system though, and i think that FreeDOS and perhaps DR-DOS (which isn't dead either) will still be able to be used in a lot of commercial, retail etc environments.

[flap]

quote:Originally posted by Calum is NOT a moderator:
FreeDOS really is like a proper GNU operating system. conceptually i think it is as much GNU as Linux

Are you sure? It doesn't look to me like FreeDOS contains any GNU software.

[mobrien_12]

FreeDOS does have fat32 support now.  I'm almost certain that it is 16-bit and know for sure that it supports 32-bit DOS programs.

[bently]

The Free DOS project like DR-DOS have mad a good deal of improvemetnts to MSDOS. The really nice thing about DR-DOS was their task manager... Also Free DOS has support for DPMI.

[Calum]

quote:Originally posted by flap:


Are you sure? It doesn't look to me like FreeDOS contains any GNU software.

well, GNU's Not Unix, neither is FreeDOS, and all the FreeDOS software is released under the GNU GPL. So unless you define GNU software as that which has been personally written by Richard Stallman, I think this qualifies.

[flap]

GNU software is software that's part of the GNU project. Software isn't automatically part of GNU just because it's licenced under the GPL.

[ June 20, 2004: Message edited by: flap ]

[Calum]

if you say so.

as it happens i am not aware then that a GNU system actually exists. in fact systems such as Debian GNU/Linux are misrepresenting themselves in that case since they include a lot of non GNU software. FreeDOS is as much GNU as the next open source OS is. it includes emacs (which was the first popular application from the GNU project (i am not counting GCC, since it is not an application)) and it includes compiled for DOS versions of many of the GNU versions of standard *ix tools.

draw your line where you may but from what you say i gather you think it's not GNU unless it's hurd (and none of that perl/samba/bsd/XFree86/any other non GNU stuff is allowed).

[ June 20, 2004: Message edited by: Calum is NOT a moderator ]