C:\DOS

A very brief blog about DOS



My experience with MS DOS goes way back to version 2.11. I can remember 2.11, 3.3, 4.01,5.0,6.0,6.2,6.21,6.22. I don't remember if the missing versions were actually released but I can remember the highlights of some of those versions:



4.01 (somewhere back in these days there was no C:\DOS directory but people started manually creating one



5.0 No 5.x releases other than 5.0 as far as I can recall, the official c:\DOS directory?



6.0 DBLSPACE Compression (ahem, stolen Stacker 2?), memmaker



6.2 Lots of bug fixes



6.21 No compression



6.22 DRVSPACE Compression



No more official MS DOS releases, a very sad day for many geeks.



I have to admit I miss some of the simpler times of PCs and computing. I whole heartedly embrace Windows these days but it was a touch sell back then. I loved playing games and DOS games were almost always better. I think DOOM was the first 32bit game using DOS4GW technology. It blew everything else away at the time. I can play that one on my cell phone now. Sure, lots of us had Microsoft Windows installed but we probably didn't run it too often.

What sucked about DOS? Well, in it's day it was pretty good. It served the purpose of being a great OS with a small footprint to run on the very basic processors which are the predecessors of today's computers. You can even boot today's machines on DOS if you wanted. I actually still use it for cloning Windows XP workstations at my office. There are not any applications that I can think of which would run in DOS these days. The thing that makes DOS suck these days (and back in the day) is the fact that every piece of hardware need a software driver to work. In 2009 it is darn near impossible to find a "real mode" or "legacy" NIC driver. There was a time when I actually had to load a DOS TCP/IP stack to do some Internet work (FTP, Gopher, Archie, and email). Unfortunately, the memory management of DOS was so archaic that once everything you needed was loaded, there was hardly anything left to do your work.