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Considering MS-DOS (Users)

posted by Dennis, 04.08.2011, 04:29

> > I have Servant Salamander here. It's one of the early dual-pane Windows
> > file managers I looked at.
>
> Hehe it seems to be popular also outside czech rep.

It's a good program.

> You probably mean old ver 1.52 that is a single exe. I use ver 2.54 with
> lot of plugins. Dayly I use built-in FTP, sometimes SCP and it is nice to
> have it integrated in panel like local drive.

Yes. I'm using the 1.52 version. I'm aware of the later additions, but don't really need them. I just wanted a file manager with two panes for local manipulation.

My preferred FTP client is the open source Filezilla package, and I have WinSCP here as well. I don't do enough FTP to need the capability in my file manager.

> > I have NDN under Linux. Which key shortcuts do you refer to? Keyboard
> > support is implemented differently in Linux, so differences there are no
> > surprise.
>
> I'm not sure now, ALT+Fx?
I'll poke around the next time I'm in Linux on that box.

> > OS/2 was supposed to be that OS, but IBM and MS couldn't agree on
> > direction. MS wanted to skip over the 286 and develop for the 386
> > instead. IBM said "No, we're developing for the 286." In retrospect,
> > this was an error. While the 286 offered additional capabilities, it
> > was essentially a transitional step, and the 386 was a far better
> > platform.
>
> In this I would agree MS :) 286 PM was crappy hybrid and 386 PM still
> suffer with some legacy due to 286 compatability (like decriptor structures
> with fragmented 32bit address and other fields...). Interesting how well
> OS/2 later utilize 386 (I mean CPL2, so it didn't run under some simplified
> VM)
The more interesting question is why IBM chose the Intel architecture for the PC, when things like the Motorola 680X0 were out there, with a flat, linear address space, unlike the X86 segmented model so beloved of DOS programmers. (Six different memory models, depending on the size of your code and the size of your data, with a segment on the 8088 being 64K. At least on a 386 and above, a segment is 4GB...)

Best guess is that they were already familiar with the Intel architecture (the DisplayWriter dedicated word processor used an 8086 CPU, with the UCSD P System), there were supporting chips and tools available, and they wanted to leverage the existing software base from the old CP/M machines running 8080 and Z80 CPUs like WordStar and VisiCalc.

> > The final nail in OS/2's coffin was IBM's decision not to provide
> > support for 32 bit Windows applications. You still find it around. The
> > last I
>
> Hm, now there's ODIN allowing to run some win32 under OS/2...
Is there really? Well, I guess I'm not surprised. There's an open source package called KernelEx that lets you run a fair amount of current 32 bit Windows applications under Win98. One of my contacts uses it to run Opera 11 when he needs to browse for something. (He normally runs DesqViewX on top of MS-DOS.)

> > knew, the ticket kiosks in the main railroad station here ran OS/2. I
> > used to have an OS/2 server at a former employer for a specialized
> > telephony application. It just ran. It there was a problem, reset it,
> > and it took up where it left off.
>
> A father of one of my friend works in a bank where AFAIK they still have
> some machines with OS/2 Warp 4.0. My friend copied install diskettes and
> this is how we meet OS/2 and I must agree that it was far beyond over
> windows...
Unfortunately, the OS/2 Warp server at my former employer lacked the install CD. I would have put it up at home. It's just the thing for a kiosk environment, where it's expected to be unattended and just run.

> But sometimes it happen that inferior product wins and spreads :P
Marketing. IBM was always a B2B company, and never really understood the consumer market. OS/ was superior, but IBM didn't know how to sell it. It sold into IBM shops who ran other IBM hardware and software, but never really seemed to get a lot of traction beyond it.

The folks behind the popular WindowBlinds Windows skinning package were big OS/2 fans and tried to buy it from IBM, but IBM wasn't interested.

If IBM were really savvy, they'd release it as open source. They are already open source players, releasing things like Eclipse and Open Object Rexx as open source products. An open source OS/2 might make interesting waves in the market.

> > There is also MinGW, an implementation of the Gnu compiler suite that
> > uses the Microsoft runtime instead of the Cygwin POSIX layer, and there
> > are ports of bash and zsh for it.
>
> I rather use mingw32 under win. It doesn't need cygwin DLL and msvcrt DLL
> is a standard part of windows. Also mingw gcc runs faster. But it has some
> tricky things like I crashed my mouth when printing 64bit ints by %lld and
> msvcrt needed %I64...
Mozilla shifted from building Windows packages using Cygwin to using MinGW as the build environment, because MinGW was inherently faster.

Cygwin is neat, and there are many reasons to use it, since it provides a pretty complete Linux toolchain in a Win32 environment, but there are times when you want a "native" build. (That said, I have a fair number of things here built using Cygwin. The only dependency is the Cygwin1.dll, and unless you happen to notice it in the install, you may not be aware it was a Cygwin build.)

> > FreeDOS includes a TSR called Peruse installed at boot time that
> > provides that sort of scroll-back buffer, which can be handy because it
> > captures boot screens before DOS is loaded.
> > You can get Peruse here:
> ftp://ftp.pcmag.com/archives/1994/0412/peruse.zip
>
> Yes this tool I had probably tried before (under MSDOS 6.22) and had some
> problem with some program together with it, long time ago...
Works fine here under FreeDOS, but isn't needed in XP.
______
Dennis

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