The empires of the future are the empires of the mind - Winston Churchill
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MS-DOS turns 30 years old
Ancient history for many readers
Thu Jul 28 2011, 16:01
BACK IN THE MISTS OF TIME when personal computers were first invented, there was a primitive command shell and program loader that most people used to make them work. It was called MS-DOS and it turned 30 years old this week.
If you vaguely remember MS-DOS and its variants like PC-DOS and DR-DOS, or you're a bit curious, our sister IT news web site V3.co.uk has revived some memories and related the story for you.
Some of us here at The INQUIRER actually remember using MS-DOS and shudder, but we might take a peek too. µ
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AH, trying to hang onto as much of that base memory (640k)as possible, and cursing the mouse driver for taking up so much :).
I still use it! Started with DOS 1.0 and worked through the versions until PC/IX became available and I discovered that what DOS was striving to do had already been done. UNIX (in some form or other) ever since.
There are still a few things that DOS does well/best, so I keep one old machine in reserve.
I don't remember it ever crashing. You learn a few commands and magic.
MS-DOS isn't 30 years old. DOS is, MS-DOS isn't. Shame on you, but you are all Mac users anyway so a little inaccuracy is to be forgiven.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS
I remember DOS very well. I actually liked DOS and enjoyed using it. Some of my favourite games only ran under DOS such as Doom and Indycar Racing. I found it reliable, stable and increased your memory function (as you had to remember commands and paths and all that sort of stuff instead of the morons' point and click).
After DOS it pretty well went downhill, real FAST.
Come back DOS all is forgiven!
In those old days, typing a few commands will makes you a genius, and earn you a lot.
Man, I missed the good old days!
Will Windows still have drive letters in another 30 years?
One can only hope.
I remember when decompressing a large file (like 30MB, that was huge) using floppy drives, when you hit a bad volume, you had to go to the store and ask another copy of the failed diskette and start all the decompression over again. XD
Ahh, back in the old days of VESA graphics. If you had 2 MB of video memory, you were damn near a super computer.
Ha ha, I still use it to play old games. Yeah, it is an emulator but those play even better than the not as old w9Xs.