Microsoft MS DOS (any version)
Value For Money
Microsoft MS DOS (any version)
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User Reviews
Value For Money
I Added This Entry For Fun, In Case We Lose Sight
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)
I still use DOS sometimes for a certain app.
Corrections :
(1) It was not requisitioned from IBM. It was commissioned by IBM from Gates' company (Microsoft) and to fulfil that commission Gates bought it cheap from Seattle Computer Products (who thought it was not worth much) and gave it a makeover.
(2) DOS was NOT the forerunner of everything we do on a PC today. There were other (and better) micro-computer OS's around before and at the time of DOS, with word-processors and games etc, and even Windows ceased to owe anything to DOS from the time of XP (and NT before that). I use Linux mostly, which is a version of UNIX - an OS which originated before DOS and never owed anything to it.
Great Review! I remember those long days as a teenager trying every single command and using the black screen for everything. Those good old days I suppose? Win 3.1 was bad - hated it. Win95 was like the best thing back then, and now it's Vista. Let's hope one day it will rival the modern counterparts of the great things MS Dos could do back in the day!
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