Have a picture of Microsoft MS DOS (any version)?, please send it to us.
| Ease of Set Up | 10/10 |
|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 10/10 |
| Value for Money | 10/10 |
| Overall rating | 10/10 |
Full review by
degbert
on 25th Jul 2007
User Rating : 10
Respect :
+1
Good Points: The original! Piece of cake to set up, piece of cake to use, never went wrong, never trapped, never needed more than 640k!
Bad Points: Didn't actually do much. No graphical environment.
General comments: I added this entry for fun, in case we lose sight of what operating systems are meant to do. Namely, they sit on top of hardware and devices and allow the user to control said devices - show something on the screen, store information, print something, read a disk... etc...
MS-DOS, an idea requisitioned from a certain company called IBM, by a couple of techie mavericks including a certain Mr. Gates, was the forerunner of everything we do today on the PC. It is a single user, bog-standard, character-based interface, with a classic 16bit architecture sitting on a 8086 chipset. And it worked. Nothing ever went wrong.
However applications vendors wanted to sell more stuff, so wanted the OS to do more; additionally the guys at Intel and elsewhere were fighting battles with other chip manufacturers, and IBM was pushing the "PC"; so inexorably DOS became too small to fill the gap in the middle and suddenly graphical interfaces (a market driven by the Unix vendors and Apple) paved the way for MS to build their attempt at an OS - MS Windows. And right up to 3.1, it was truly dreadful. IBM did a much better job with the OS/2 releases during that time (ironically an MS project to start with).
And the rest is history, as indeed was the fate of DOS.
Which is a shame because, and compare this to today folks, it never went wrong, and didn't use much memory.
Happy days :o)
degbert's review and ratings | 273 words | 1 comment added.
| Misco | £94.68 |
