All Things Microsoft > Microsoft Software
DOS: Reasons to prefer it above Windowz
WMD:
quote:What I liked about DOS was its simplicity ... if you wanted something you had to program it yourself. You didn't have to rely on badly written APIs or be confined by the OS.
--- End quote ---
This is true somewhat...the latest Windoze keylogger is 100k, 85k of that in DLLs. To log keystrokes. :rolleyes:
But, this got really bad for some programs. There was no printing API, so all apps needed their own drivers. Same for high-res video, sound, what have you. THAT was a mess.
bedouin:
Hmm, this thread brings back memories of buying the newest games, knowing on the ride home I'd be awaiting an additional 2 hours of autoexec.bat and config.sys tweaking/bootdisk creation before it would even work.
If you ever ran a BBS you will have some sort of DOS nostalgia, no matter how repugnant the experience actually was. It's kind of like battered women's syndrome.
pandronic:
quote:Originally posted by WMD:
But, this got really bad for some programs. There was no printing API, so all apps needed their own drivers. Same for high-res video, sound, what have you. THAT was a mess.
--- End quote ---
True, except for the mouse. The CD-ROM drivers worked on top of MSCDEX. Also there weren't big problems with hires video if you had a VESA 1.2/2.0 compliant card. Most of the sound cards were SB compliant so all you had to do was to set the port, DMA and IRQ in autoexec.bat.
I agree it's a mess and to sell such a product is something only Microsoft can do, but you had the power to fully control your OS and your computer. Now you have to go where your OS tells you to go (Windows more, Linux less, but still ...)
Aloone_Jonez:
Yes, mono-tasking operating systems are cool, they let your programs have all the resources to play with, single tasking OS is best suited to games, embedded systems and batch processing.
How can a crappy 400MHz game console run better games than an 1GHz PC running Linux?
Because it has a very small and compact-mono tasking operating system.
An OS like DOS has the potential to be a great for gaming, the only problems are drivers and the lack of a standard graphics API. If it were possible to write a standard API and port drivers for the latest accelerated 3D graphics and sound cards to FreeDOS, then DOS could be the next big thing. Come to think of it DOS is so small it could be on the same CD as the game, all you would have to do is boot from the CD and the game would automatically load there could be a problem with saving games though.
insomnia:
NO NO NO ...
DOS really does suck.
It always was (and is) a kiddy toy.
Ps: So YES, even NT is a lot better.
[ August 21, 2004: Message edited by: insomnia ]
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