Microsoft's MS-DOS is 30 today (ahhh, the good ole days)

[The Straight Story]

10: Microsoft's MS-DOS is 30 today
20: Kudos to QDOS
30: Print "

MS-DOS is 30 years old today. Well, kind of. On 27 July 1981, Microsoft gave the name MS-DOS to the disk operating system it acquired on that day from Seattle Computer Products (SCP), a hardware company owned and run by a fellow called Rod Brock.

SCP developed what it at various times called QDOS and 86-DOS to run on a CPU card it had built based on Intel's 8086 processor.

The company had planned to use Digital Research's CP/M-86 operating system, then still in development. But, having released the card in November 1979 - it shipped with an 8086-compatible version Microsoft's Basic language interpreter-cum-operating system - and reached April 1980 without CP/M-86 becoming available to bundle, SCP decided it had to create its own OS for the card.

Enter, in August 1980, QDOS. It really did stand for Quick and Dirty Operating System. That's actually what it was: a basic but serviceable OS good for coding and running programs written in 8086 assembly language - the x86 instruction set. It was written by SCP's Tim Paterson, who had joined the company as a programmer a couple of years previously and began work on it in April 1980."

40: END

http://www.reghardware.com/2011/07/27/ms_dos_turns_30/

[hobbit709]

1. the good old days.

I still have occasion to use DOS in troubleshooting.

[tridim]

8. It's good for piping huge lists of files into a single text file.

I still don't know how to do that in Windows.

These days I probably use cmd about once a month.

[slackmaster]

15. I usually have two or three cmd shells open on the Windows Server 2003 VM I use at work

There are many things that are easier, or only possible, to do in a text shell. That includes a lot of basic network debugging and troubleshooting functions like ping, tracert, ipconfig, route, etc.

[Glorfindel]

2. Recommend

[Phoonzang]

3. Ah...the days of fighting with config.sys and autoexec.bat to get a program to work

Good days...I miss them. Made you earn your fun.

[mikeytherat]

5. Good times, good times. We called that game "The RAM Cram"

Maybe I can get that to Load High...

mikey_the_rat

[Logical]

7. I really do miss them!

[tridim]

9. F*cking soundblaster.

[Logical]

13. LOL.... IRQ hell!!!

[slackmaster]

12. At one point my home computer had about five boot options under MS-DOS 5

I had various configurations of QEMM to squeeze as much memory in as possible.

I'll see if I can find some of the old configuration files.

[drm604]

16. Good old QEMM.

I remember it well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM

[slackmaster]

17. And DESQview 386

I actually ran Windows (3.0?) under DESQview for a while before I trusted it enough to be my main operating environment.

[Yavin4]

4. I Still Run Batch Files At Work n/t

[Logical]

6. Ahh, thanks for the fond memory.....

I loved stuff back then when it was not so easy! fun times!

[mahigan]

10. CP/M

I started my computer "career" on CP/M and I still think it was the better o/s until DOS 5. I do miss those days in many ways and still do some command line stuff just as a reminder of what, in computer terms, is ancient history. Having to learn MSDOS turned off more people from using computers in those days than anything else but those that stuck it out at least had some fundamental understanding of how how computers worked - unlike most users today.

[slackmaster]

11. The edlin text editor still exists in Windows Server 2003, and I still know how to use it

Now I'm feeling old.

[Buns_of_Fire]

14. Ah, yes. When you'd actually get a manual -- ON PAPER -- in the box along with the software.

Back in the days when you had to figure out how to distill every file name into the 8.3 format. And before there were gangs of kids all just plotting to walk on my lawn...

[MgtPA]

21. I still have the BIOS listing that IBM included in the Tech Ref Manual.

[Logical]

18. I remember when I thought Borlands Sidekick was the coolest app ever! n- t

[MgtPA]

22. Before Sidekick came out, we created TSRs to configure 3 different printers

prior to printing from WordStar. It was really fun.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

19. And the Serial Port turns 50 next year

[kestrel91316]

20. I remember when my college BF was talking about this stuff in development.....

back when he tried to teach ME, the microbiology major, to program in Basic.

Major FAIL. He turned me completely off to all things computer until I finally recovered and got my first PC in 2000.

Ah, the good old days.....

[hunter]

23. That Piece of Shit and the IBM PC...

...aliens from another planet with hostile intent could not have done a better job crippling the personal computer at its emergence.

[Logical]

24. Always a Jerk around who wants to ruin a fun thread! Classy!

[hunter]

29. I have a dosbox icon on my desktop. I can run all my old PC-DOS stuff whenever I want to...

... from linux.

http://www.dosbox.com

QuickBasic, Turbo Pascal, Geoworks, Windows 3.1, a bunch of DOS games... it's all just a click or two away.

Every time I upgrade my computers I bring all my old stuff with me. I've got BSD Unix stuff I wrote more than thirty years ago on my current computer; not that I use it, but only because hard drives have increased in capacity so rapidly I've never had any reason to delete it.

I also wrote quite a bit of stuff for DOS. Sometimes I can be nostalgic about it, but all said, the 8088 PC and MS-DOS was a hideous corporate zombie apocalypse.

Maybe I'd feel better if I'd ridden the MS-DOS/PC wave to wealth, but I didn't. :P

[tridim]

26. You just had to be slightly smarter than the computer in the old days.

Today any dumbass can run a computer, and many think they are experts.

I was already browsing the Web and chatting in real-time with people in Europe when DOS was standard.

[LanternWaste]

28. Human nature, I suppose...

I imagine we often denigrate those things we're unable to master. Human nature, I suppose. :shrug:

[nadinbrzezinski]

25. Ah the MEMORIES

[L0oniX]

27. Dosshell rocked.