Re: DOS, was Re: Ada Tutor Web Site Shutting Down

[Rugxulo <rugxulo@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On May 12, 5:17 pm, Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauh...@futureapps.de>
wrote:
> On 5/12/11 8:24 PM, Adam Beneschan wrote:
>
> > On May 12, 10:40 am, Rugxulo<rugx...@gmail.com>  wrote:
>
> They have even built a "co-operative" multitasking graphical
> Windows(TM) system on top of DOSs, yes. But suppose an Acorn Archimedes
> computer had cost 1K less and that MS had not been the marketing agency
> that had understood how to win cheap and sell their stuff to
> office equipment suppliers.  Would you still be arguing
> that DOS is the good foundation?  And RISC OS not a good foundation?
>
> DOS was cheap.  Technically superior solutions tended to be more
> expensive at the time of purchase.

PC-DOS was available first. CP/M-86 and UCSD Pascal came later and
cost more. And PC-DOS even supported a similar API as CP/M! 8086 was
8080-translatable too. And 16-bit beat 8-bit any day, considered a big
improvement. The PCs at the time just didn't have RAM for all these
fancy OSes we see now. (Apple Macintosh GUI w/ mouse didn't appear
until 1984.) When you have much less than a meg, anything will do: you
just want to get work done. Besides, DOS v1 was way different and
worse than v3.3 or especially DOS v5 (1991).

Your argument is that DOS was inferior, which may be (somewhat) true.
But any OS that people can sell software attracts developers. So to
them, money is money. The same is true today, they will plod through
all kinds of pains in order to earn a living. (I've heard the PS3 is a
pain to program, but I don't know personally.) The Wii is the weakest
of the three modern console by far, but it sold the best.

> With Tom Moran's comment in mind:
>
> - Is DOS simple to use?  Give someone an MS-DOS manual.
> If they had not had prior CS training, they will end up in
> despair asking neighbors for help about what it all means.
>
> Give some kid an iPad and watch. Granted, the system is much
> more capable than a DOS PC, but most concepts are deliberately
> kept simple, as simple as Microsoft Bob was to be.

They're both the same, more or less. If you don't program a computer
yourself, everything has to be pre-made for you, a canned solution. So
it depends entirely on what is available. Clearly the iPad/iPod craze
is more about pre-made apps than rolling your own. If you want to
design your own hardware to do everything you need (no more, no less),
it'll end up quirky like Forth. But designing a one-size-fits-all like
Windows turns into a huge bloated behemoth (for good or bad) trying to
cater to 6 billion potential customers (who love to complain). Yeah,
works great if you don't mind 1+ GB of RAM (seems ridiculous, but I
guess I'm getting old, heh).

> - More than once I had to give up a floppy or hard disk whose
> FAT got shot. The BIOS would help with reading out relevant
> sectors; but if the dangling pointer had hit the right sector,
> no BIOS would help,  A few companies were flourishing because
> they provided forensic analysis and repair; had DOS had a
> quality file system, PC Tools, Norton, etc. would have had
> a different business plan.

FAT is primitive, yes, and I do think DOS needs newer file systems.
FreeDOS-32 (mostly stalled) has worked on LEAN, and others exist that
would probably be somewhat better (more or less), e.g. HPFS. Even
FAT32's VFAT hacks are still patented (ugh). But anyways, the point is
that it was all an improvement at the time it was created. It's much
easier to implement FAT16 than ext2, esp. with the 1 MB limit. Of
course, nowadays anybody would reasonably create a 32-bit driver (even
under DOS) with nobody complaining. But at the time, back in the day,
that wasn't reasonable.

And by the way, there are two FATs, so ideally both wouldn't be
corrupted. And yes, obviously, you should back it up if it's that
fragile (and various tools exist that do such). Your point seems to be
"Something bad can happen, therefore it sucks." While I agree it's not
perfectly ideal, sometimes you have to take the initiative and fix or
workaround things yourself.

> A file system of different qualities means a shift in likelihood:
> with more redundancy, is is more likely are that you only loose
> a few files and not an entire file system.  Slightly higher
> cost, higher quality file system.

FAT32, due to higher capacity, is much harder to cache in RAM. MS
themselves claim this as a reason for their arbitrary limits (32 GB?)
on FAT32 creation on newer Windows (though some debate these claims).
My point is that FAT16 is leaner due to inherently being smaller.
Sure, you trade off some features, but that's to keep the footprint
low.

Face it, things like Solaris' ZFS needs gigs of RAM to run reasonably,
which is why we haven't all switched to it. (And it's not GPL-
friendly, which is the only reason Linux hasn't adopted it. Bah,
license incompatibility has slowed progress.)

> For one thing, DOS effectively ruled out a number of design
> patterns:  you need something on top of DOS in order to
> operate(!) these patterns.  Such as programmable auxiliary
> tasks doing background work.

TSRs?  :-)   Novell DR-DOS 7 had true multitasking, but it needed a
386. The 286 could only do task switching (a la MS' DOSSHELL).
Desqview had a version that sorta worked on 8086, but once the 286
came out, most people stayed away from anything else.

Part of the problem is high cost of software, so people want all their
old (expensive) stuff to still work. So Bill Gates calls the 286
"braindead" for not effectively supporting switching to real mode
(e.g. for OS/2 1.x) for DOS stuff. The 386 fixed this with V86 mode,
which is one of the reasons Win 3.0 was a big success (not to mention
DPMI).

> I think that DOS successfully persuaded parts of the industry
> that being simple implies being cheap.  But DOS PCs are more
> cheap than simple.

Is Linux simple? Is Linux cheap? What about Windows? Mac OS X? I'm not
sure any of those are truly cheap or easy to use. Yet that's what
we've got. In some ways, I consider all these advanced features
useless if nobody can understand how to use them.   :-(