Announcement

**mark pruitt** · 20 Dec 2002, 09:43 AM

I am glad to see that DOS lives!!!

I have an old Compaq I use as strictly a "DOS machine". It has DRDOS
7.03 as the primary OS, along with 4DOS (by JPSoft - everything Micro$oft
DO$ could have been). It's only purpose in life is to provide a home for
PB/DOS 3.5 and Vision. There is a 700MHZ partition that holds a very
GUI - lite version of Linux Redhat as well, patiently waiting for the day
it will host PB for Linux!

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Mark Pruitt
[email protected]

**Jerry Mason** · 20 Dec 2002, 09:48 AM

DOS Lives? It's thriving, if you know where to look... here's
just one site full of examples:
http://www.opus.co.tt/dave/index.htm

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**Joep van Steen** · 20 Dec 2002, 11:42 AM

The DOS 10 Commandments

1.) I am thy DOS, thou shall have no OS before me, unless Bill Gates gets
a cut of the profits therefrom.

2.) Thy DOS is a character based, single user, single tasking, standalone
operating system. Thou shall not attempt to make DOS network, multitask,
or display a graphical user interface, for that would be a gross hack.

3.) Thy hard disk shall never have more than 1024 sectors. You don't need
that much space anyway.

4.) Thy application program and data shall all fit in 640K of RAM. After
all, it's ten times what you had on a CP/M machine. Keep holy
this 640K of RAM, and clutter it not with device drivers, memory
managers, or other things that might make thy computer useful.

5.) Thou shall use the one true slash character to separate thy directory
path. Thou shall learn and love this character, even though it appears
on no typewriter keyboard, and is unfamiliar. Standardization on where
that character is located on a computer keyboard is right out.

6.) Thou shall edit and shuffle the sacred lines of CONFIG.SYS and
AUTOEXEC.BAT until DOS functions adequately for the likes of you. Giving
up in disgust is not allowed.

7.) Know in thy heart that DOS shall always maintain backward
compatibility to the holy 2.0 version, blindly ignoring opportunities to
become compatible with things created in the latter half of this
century. But you can still run WordStar 1.0

8.) Improve thy memory, for thou shall be required to remember that
JD031792.LTR is the letter that you wrote to Jane Doe three years ago
regarding the tax deductible contribution that you made to her
organization. The IRS Auditor shall be impressed by thy memory as he
stands over you demanding proof.

9.) Pick carefully the names of thy directories, for renaming them shall
be mighty difficult. While you're at it, don't try to relocate
branches of the directory tree, either.

10.) Learn well the Vulcan Nerve Pinch (ctrl-alt-del) for it shall be thy
saviour on many an occasion. Believe in thy heart that everyone
reboots their OS to solve problems that shouldn't occur in the first place.

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Joep
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl

[This message has been edited by Joep van Steen (edited December 20, 2002).]

**Davide Vecchi** · 23 Dec 2002, 12:42 AM

Ah, funny But it looks like many of these Commandments apply to MS-DOS, not to DOS. And maybe the #10 was erroneously taken from a Windows thing ?
Mmm, i think my customer who has to uninterruptedly run unattended number-crunching apps wouldn' t frame that and hang it to the wall Unless i was suggesting him to port all code to Linux of course... but i'm not ready for this yet

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Davide Vecchi
[email protected]

**Hans Rasmussen** · 23 Dec 2002, 07:11 AM

The second Commandment is not quit true!
Some sort of multitasking was included in MS-DOS 5.0.
In DOSSHELL. But nobody used DOSSHELL so Microsoft removed
it in later versions.
Pesonally I have used PC-DOS 7.0 from IBM since 1999.
Later it was renamed DOS2000. Among other things it includes
Stacker for disk-compression. An exellent program.

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**Mike Luther** · 23 Dec 2002, 07:50 AM

As well as DR-DOS being a yet viable alternate for DOS operations,
you might note that IBM's version of DOS is still very much alive
and supported. This is all recall, not supported by the URL facts
here .. but memory says that it was updated to Y2K compliance, in
whatever format that might be at the same time OS/2 was moved forward
to Y2K compliance. The DOS-VDM operations in OS/2 were synchronized
with that. Further, recall says that in a release surrounding the
question of support for their separate version of DOS, support will
continue for it. And unless my memory is wrong, the admitted number
of supported sites world-wide that they were committed to supporting
was the round number 16,000,000 installs.

The issue about a supportable and on-going DOS that will boot and run
things from floppy drives is still quite important in some oblique
ways, per what I've seen. For example, at least as a couple years ago,
the entire flash BIOS updates for the Adaptec 2940UW and 2940U2W SCSI
hard disk controller cards required a dedicated DOS floppy for boot.
Not only that you have to copy the update flash program to it, but
the upgrade program also requires etither EMM386, or QEMM whatever,
or some form of upper memory enablement to even run!

And much as I might like OS/2 ... grin... you can't make a bootable
DOS diskette from it for such purposes.. even though a far better
DOS than DOS exists within it. Wry smiley.

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Mike Luther
[email protected]

**Jerry Mason** · 23 Dec 2002, 09:00 AM

Bah Humbug, Joep!

I've been developing powerbasic (and turbobasic) code for ten years
now. A lot of it is running on Megatel single-board PC's (4 inches
square by 1/2 " thick), 386 and 486 class machines with as little as 2 MB
RAM and 1 MB flash disk (not even as big as a floppy disk...). They run
DOS 6.2, and a 200K powerbasic executable. No keyboard, no video, no mouse;
all communication is through the serial port. Show me where the Linux
or Windows install disks are for a machine like that.

These computers control and monitor mechanisms on astronomical instruments
mounted to telescopes. This hardware and software runs continuously for months
at a time without power cycling, reboots or restarts. The only time they are
shut down is when lightning storms are threatening. Never had a crash yet,
which is important when the user is literally a non-technical person with
minimal or non-existant onsite support on a mountain top 8000 miles away.

Would I give up my bullet-proof DOS and Powerbasic for something "better"? Nope, not
until you can pry those floppies from my cold, dead hands....

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**Joep van Steen** · 23 Dec 2002, 01:14 PM

Hey .. this was meant to be funny ...

I write DOS apps in PB3.5 for datarecovery. I NEED DOS .... currently using FreeDos, soon my DOS based apps will ship with PTSDOS which is a bit more stable.

I love DOS!

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Joep

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl

**Hans Ruegg** · 3 Jan 2003, 06:32 AM

Just curious: Does anybody know what the license conditions
for DR-DOS are? There was once an information that Lineo
distributed it as free software, but now it seems to be
commercial again?

Hans Ruegg

**James A Gant** · 3 Jan 2003, 11:06 AM

To Hans Ruegg: See the Allen's first post in this thread. Go to http://www.drdos.com/

You will find their "free" download of version 7.03 floppy images.
There is probably some sort of licensing agreement on one of the
floppys. IMHO drdos is much better than Ms-Dos 6.22. But I doubt
it will run with any 32 bit version of Windows.

James.

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