Do you like DOS?

[ryaxnb]

Linux users seem to like DOS. Why? I wager: It's because its simple, follows the KISS to an extradionary degree, and does virtually nothing, so it can do virtually nothing wrong. Its command-line is neat, and sometimes I still type DIR or COPY in terminal - too much Win98 experience! :D DOS has good command-line file manipulation, the incredible norton commander, and remains in my mind the best way (with dosemu) to get decent word processor/spreadseet support at the command-line - just drag up WordPerfect Office 97 for DOS or whatever!. DOSes selection of command-line productivity, debug, development, and more was very great. And finally, DOS had two decent web browsers - arachne and lynx.
Do you think DOS was/is cool?

[samjh]

Back in the day, DOS was pretty cool. But Unix was better. ;)

[FranMichaels]

Erggh... Not sure how to vote on this one. I do enjoy DOS games, so it's nostalgia. But honestly, it was a bit of a pain in the butt. One thing at a time, the commands were limited, 8.3 filenames... Sure you have copy, move, rename, concat, and simple batch files.
But for running games, there was always that 640k crap. TSRs, running mem maker, messing with config.sys and autoexec.bat, highmem... Let's not forget manually setting the interrupts, IRQ, DMA, etc. Not to mention MS-DOS wasn't exactly stable. Things did lock every now and then.

So, I like the keep it simple method we have now with Ubuntu and Gnome, and the terminal absolutely rocks, especially with tab completion and all the awesome tools (like history and grep). I've barely scratched the surface though.

As for dosbox which uses some of freedos as it's base. It's great as I can run games trivially compared to a real DOS machine. Not really DOS's fault though, as timing issue (remember that turbo button on your 486? It was there for games...) and differing graphic, cga, ega, vga, svga...


Either way, don't miss DOS of old, as I have a better experience with it now emulated, and the FreeDOS implementation actually seems rock solid.

So yeah. :popcorn:

/end rant

[isaacj87]

Linux users seem to like DOS. Why? I wager: It's because its simple, follows the KISS to an extradionary degree, and does virtually nothing, so it can do virtually nothing wrong. Its command-line is neat, and sometimes I still type DIR or COPY in terminal - too much Win98 experience! :D DOS has good command-line file manipulation, the incredible norton commander, and remains in my mind the best way (with dosemu) to get decent word processor/spreadseet support at the command-line - just drag up WordPerfect Office 97 for DOS or whatever!. DOSes selection of command-line productivity, debug, development, and more was very great. And finally, DOS had two decent web browsers - arachne and lynx.
Do you think DOS was/is cool?

Heh...I still use "dir" in terminal too.

[Chilli Bob]

DOS Rocked. DR-DOS 6.0 doubly rocked. One day when I get time I will install DOSEMU and track down copies of PC-write, PC-outline and as-easy-as. Then life will be good again.

EDIT: Seriously, I have never found a program as good as PC-Outline. I just did a Google search and while there is supposedly a windows version (cost $39.95), all the download links are broken.

Does anyone know of a Linux program that functions the same way?

As a side note, Google is SUPER FAST. I Searched for "PC-Outline", and my original post above came up on the second page. Less than a minute after I posted it. I'm impressed!

[lisati]

How about md or rd in the terminal? Or even copy? Or accidentally using the wrong slash in file names / for \ & vice-versa....

[jonabyte]

dos gave me control over my computer, even with win95 installed....similar to what Linux gives me now....
:guitar:

[paul101]

wtf is dos?? :lolflag:



seriously...

[billgoldberg]

wtf is dos?? :lolflag:



seriously...

I presume it's this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS

I'm only 21, so I never had any real experience with it.

The only time I used DOS is when I was 12 or something and played some games from a floppy on it in a friends house.

Seems ages ago.

[shivans]

I used to have an old IBM x286 with Dosshell built in to it.

Showing my age however, my first pc was an Oric 1.

[dje]

No, not compared to the awesomeness of RISC OS :D

[KingTermite]

I loved DOS back in the day. That was when I really started to become a computer geek.

I tinkered with Dr-DOS, but to me it was somewhat like our complaints with IE using non-standard web stuff.....if you don't know the real and correct one, then you can't expect to work everywhere, so I quickly dumped Dr-DOS and stuck with MS-DOS.

I've never used FreeDOS though.

[init1]

Yeah I really like FreeDOS for it's simplicity. No need to worry about libraries, configuration, or dependences. Most of the time, all you need is an EXE and maybe a few extra files in the folder it came in. I have it on my old and my new laptop, because it's really fast and is perfect for playing Dungeon Crawl :D

[Npl]

weird question, the only good thing about DOS was that you could disable it.
But its commands were more understandable than Unix (no big feat). Who`s thinking of "ls", "rm" or "creat" when he could just use right verbs.

[ramadan]

DOS was never cool"especially MSdos 6.22", it is slow, unitask,you dont have enough memory, and ready to crash

but Norton Commander is amazing ( i still some times use NC5 on XP)

[Vince4Amy]

DOS was fine back in the day, and I used DR DOS a few times because it had to be loaded up for Gem Desktop to run. This was on an Amstrad PC 1512, which I still have, it's only used for playing old games on now.

I can either boot Gem or run MS-DOS off of floppies on that machine.

[HostV]

I think that DOS is good several things where it can be useful and that is very difficult to get if that cool or not cool

[Bungo Pony]

I still use it on occasion, especially for running old DOS apps that I still use. I've got an old 486 laptop dedicated for those.

BTW, I occasionally find myself typing 'ls' at the command prompt :)

You really can't blame me for that one though. I've gone through numerous generations of computers where the command for listing the contents of a 'directory' has changed. I've probably typed 'catalog' at a DOS prompt before as well, but I don't think I've ever typed 'LOAD"$",8' :D

[y6FgBn)~v]

It was good in its day. I still have some of my old batch files on floppy, talk about useless sentiment :lolflag:

[mikjp]

In a way, yes. I used DOS from 80s till summer '97. WordPerfect 5.1 still rules!

[msrinath80]

DOS was the coolest O/S I've ever used. Even if a program locked up, just hitting the reset button would bring back the C:\> prompt in a jiffy! I still remember those exiting days fooling around with QuarterDeck's Memory manager software and the 4DOS shell on my 486Sx. Not to forget the hardware used to run DOS. Those old x86 CPUs did not even need a heatsink let alone a fan! These days Dosbox serves my needs well.

[KingTermite]

I still remember those exiting days fooling around with QuarterDeck's Memory manager software and the 4DOS shell on my 486Sx.
Rookie!

Real men did their own memory management! :p

I remember adding up the sizes of various device driver files, and working out optimum loading sequences based on the page size. I used to wonder why so many people used Qemm when you could do the same thing yourself pretty easily.

[RiceMonster]

DOS is cool. I use DOSBox to play some old DOS games like Wolfenstein, Quake, and Commander Keen.

[L815]

I never did anything spectacular with DOS, but the simplicity was good. Nothing I couldn't get over :P. Windows pretty much killed my interest at CLI, but Ubuntu has fixed this :)

[msrinath80]

Rookie!

Real men did their own memory management! :p

I remember adding up the sizes of various device driver files, and working out optimum loading sequences based on the page size. I used to wonder why so many people used Qemm when you could do the same thing yourself pretty easily.

Indeed. In hindsight, I wonder why I bothered messing around with QEMM and umbpci.sys.

[Sand & Mercury]

cd\doom
doom

exit

Were the only commands I knew when I first used it at 5 years old, but they were all I needed at the time :D Later on, there was a point where one of the computers I used only worked with DOS, so I used EDIT to type up a story in my spare time. xD

[KingTermite]

cd\doom
doom

exit

Were the only commands I knew when I first used it at 5 years old, but they were all I needed at the time

Man, did you just make me feel old. I was in college when Doom was "da bomb". The random killing mayhem got me through Physics.

[Sunflower1970]

I hated (and still do) DOS. I always had to struggle with commands, using the \ instead of the / always irked me. With Linux, all the command make sense as to what they mean. I find them much more easy to remember and use than I ever could with DOS.

[KingTermite]

I hated (and still do) DOS. I always had to struggle with commands, using the \ instead of the / always irked me. With Linux, all the command make sense as to what they mean. I find them much more easy to remember and use than I ever could with DOS.

That has GOT to be conditioning of which one you used most/first. You must also have used DOS after fancier (graphical) systems were out as DOS was around long before linux (though Unix commands are typically the same).


"ls" makes more sense than "dir"?
"cp" makes more sense than "copy"?
"cat" makes more sense than "type"?

Power - Linux has all the benefits, hands down. But DOS did have easier syntax.

I remember back in the days when I learned Unix at the university, I liked it but missed the simpler command syntax. About the same time I began working with VMS on some DEC machines at work. I loved VMS, I used to describe it as "Unix with DOS synatx".

[Sunflower1970]

That has GOT to be conditioning of which one you used most/first. You must also have used DOS after fancier (graphical) systems were out as DOS was around long before linux (though Unix commands are typically the same).


"ls" makes more sense than "dir"?
"cp" makes more sense than "copy"?
"cat" makes more sense than "type"?

Power - Linux has all the benefits, hands down. But DOS did have easier syntax.

I remember back in the days when I learned Unix at the university, I liked it but missed the simpler command syntax. About the same time I began working with VMS on some DEC machines at work. I loved VMS, I used to describe it as "Unix with DOS synatx".

I did use DOS first. Old TRS-80. Was the OS called TRSDOS? My brother, figured it out, creating little programs here and there, but I struggled with commands on it. The next time I used a computer was 88-89. I have no idea what the OS was on it. But it wasn't a GUI. All I remember about that was it has Mahjongg on it and a really crappy word processor that had a blue background to type on. That's all I could figure out how to use on it. I did buy a book on DOS at one point years ago, to try and teach myself, but still struggled.

Once I stuck Linux on my computers, got comfortable with the desktop, and started to use the terminal, for whatever reason, the commands made perfect sense. Strange at may be, using 'cp' is easier for me than 'copy' in DOS, the backslashes/forwardslashes always confused me in DOS, 'ls' makes more sense, as does 'cat' and the file structure is much easier to keep track of than it does in Windows.

I'm not a programmer--heck I couldn't develop a program if I tried (I can't even create javascript stuff for websites--and I've tried. Just does not compute for whatever reason), nor am a Windows poweruser. But how Linux is set up, for whatever reason, I took to very quickly and easily.

[KingTermite]

I did use DOS first. Old TRS-80. Was the OS called TRSDOS?

OK...I guess "DOS" was used generically. I used TRS-DOS a little in high school, but really don't remember much about the commands. I did find this wikipedia reference though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-DOS

Still appears to have easier syntax.

Like I said...it's what you get used to, I suppose. You probably didn't use TRS-DOS enough to really get deep in to it and didn't get "deep" until you were using Linux.

With me, my first computer had DOS, and after struggling for months, I sat down over the course of a few weeks or a month and read my MS-DOS manual cover to cover and practiced/played with damn near every command so that I knew them inside and out.

[doorknob60]

I used to love making batch files and crap :-D Without DOS, learning the terminal in Linux probably would have been a lot harder, because I already new the basic commands like cd and dir (I learned ls later).

[toupeiro]

Some of the most effective things I do in windows today is based on my experiences with DOS. I am a heavy command prompt user in windows. I still write batch and .cmd files. I still use for/do loops and if/goto or if/then statements to make a ten minute task a ten second one.