From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,6192a34d0c9ffe5b X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!s11g2000yqj.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Rugxulo Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: DOS, was Re: Ada Tutor Web Site Shutting Down Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 13:12:37 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <7f53de8e-2400-4c87-a818-0b389e117c42@e21g2000yqe.googlegroups.com> <2aeab5d1-fa6d-47de-ab53-9a8e6ab5f27a@h9g2000pre.googlegroups.com> <3a6f1fc2-3ae0-42d9-b483-d16cf7ab1566@x8g2000prh.googlegroups.com> <991499fb-bc24-4d7e-baf6-a9c0e16333e6@k22g2000yqh.googlegroups.com> <291504a4-ec55-45f1-bf7f-13078bf71c3e@m10g2000yqd.googlegroups.com> <4dcbf260$0$6992$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net> <3bae2d75-31b0-4a88-b655-bd657921d15c@z7g2000prh.googlegroups.com> <4dcc5c75$0$6891$9b4e6d93@newsspool2.arcor-online.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.13.115.246 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1305317557 11603 127.0.0.1 (13 May 2011 20:12:37 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 20:12:37 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: s11g2000yqj.googlegroups.com; posting-host=65.13.115.246; posting-account=p5rsXQoAAAB8KPnVlgg9E_vlm2dvVhfO User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.696.65 Safari/534.24,gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:20227 Date: 2011-05-13T13:12:37-07:00 List-Id: Hi, On May 12, 5:17=A0pm, Georg Bauhaus wrote: > On 5/12/11 8:24 PM, Adam Beneschan wrote: > > > On May 12, 10:40 am, Rugxulo =A0wrote: > > 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. =A0Would you still be arguing > that DOS is the good foundation? =A0And RISC OS not a good foundation? > > DOS was cheap. =A0Technically 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? =A0Give 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, =A0A 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. =A0Slightly 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: =A0you need something on top of DOS in order to > operate(!) these patterns. =A0Such 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. =A0But 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. :-(