Dr. DOS Betamax's DOS Fansite(chebucto.ns.ca) |
Dr. DOS Betamax's DOS Fansite(chebucto.ns.ca) |
Arobase is used a lot in France, probably like the other Spanish and Portuguese terms. However, the English ones not so much.
Digital Research made GEM (a Mac-like desktop GUI) and included a pared down version called ViewMAX in DR DOS 5.0 but ultimately didn't deliver on providing a Mac-like interface.
https://www.osnews.com/story/26322/apple-vs-dri-the-iotheri-...
But GEM ran on 2 different platforms: DOS PCs, and on the Atari ST. The Atari version was not affected by Apple's lawsuit and delivered a very slick interface.
What can be seen there is a work of love/passion, from not that much people, running in an emulator, which enables configurations which were either very expensive, rare, or didn't even ever exist.
Of all the flavours of DOS it was the best at the time.
I've also been curious about fbui (in-kernel windowing system). Not sure how well it works with current kernels, though: https://github.com/8l/fbui
Having really modest needs, I even made an effort to use FreeDOS for essential tasks (writing, PDFs, some scripting), but gave up quickly as I cannot live without a good PDF pager or (for some tasks) soundcard support. I also had trouble with constant fan noise on DOS (you'll need some hacks to maybe get around this). It is still mind blowing how fast FreeDOS (or e.g. the even more barebones SvarDOS) boots. It took literally about 2 seconds to greet myself with the good old "C:\>".
Also, it is a system that fits inside the head of even an ordinary person. This is really refreshing these days.
IIRC, that site once had Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 pages as well.
1: E.g: https://www.mail-archive.com/search?l=freedos-user@lists.sou...
Or: https://www.mail-archive.com/search?l=freedos-user@lists.sou...
Or: https://www.mail-archive.com/search?l=freedos-user@lists.sou...
https://web.archive.org/web/20110407222115/http://www.oldfil...
It was a webring/directory for old computers and DOS/Win3x enthusiasts. Unfortunately long gone, but it lasted from 2003 until the mid 2010s.
Windows wouldn't even load on some PC's depending on which memory manager you had installed, what else you were trying to run and what kind of network stack(s) you had loaded.
In some places, trying to get people to switch to Microsoft Word away from WordPerfect result in some very heated discussions. Similarly with products like "Sidekick"[0] - a manner of working that many people got used to.
Windows was often an imposition from corporate. Windows 3.0 was popular but it wasn't necessarily an improvement over the way people were working with IBM PCs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate-and-stay-resident_pr...
When they switched to Windows, you could see how much the point-and-click interface slowed them down.
I think it was also a result from PCs being sold in mid-90' with Windows preinstalled [0] and the disappearance of naked PCs or PCs sold with alternative OS like GEM [1]. For example around the time of Windows 95 commercialization (1995), Apple went nearly bankrupt. Same for DEC, Atari, commodore and many other small providers.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
The other problem is that PCs basically weren't fast enough for full graphical interfaces at the time. So there was a period when DOS was acceptably fast for most purposes and Windows really wasn't even when it started to get reasonably usable in the Windows 3.0 timeframe.
Lots of people had workflows using non-graphical or non-windows based DOS software. Windows was one of many GUIs. A lot of early Windows software wasn't as fully featured as the DOS version, and DOS was in many cases faster. It was pretty clear after a few hours with GUI software that it was the future, but early Windows 1, and 2 for a lot of users, the answer was not now.
Less than a 2 years I'd say, with 2.5 years at the maximum: Win95 GA is August '95 and Quake 2 hit the last nail in the DOS gaming coffin in December '97
It was an absurdingly fast process, in Jan 1996 we got Duke3D, Quake in the summer, and dual boot with DOS was the norm.
In 1997 we got a bunch of Build-engine releases for DOS: Blood and Redneck Rampage in ~May, Shadow Warrior in September; while MDK, GTA, Carmageddon, Dungeon Keeper, Fallout got a mixed Win/DOS release and 3dfx was at it's peak.
Quake 2, Tomb Raider 2, Wing Commander: Prophecy are released for the Christmas sales and are Windows only.
Dual boot is still a thing for some games, but the new games are targeting Windows and DirectX.
Diablo (January), NFS2 (March) and AoE (October) are Windows only.
In 1998 there is no noticeable DOS-only or Win/DOS releases, except some add-ons for the earlier games.
Before mentioned Quake 2, StarCraft (April), Unreal (May), FreeSpace (June), Half-Life (November) are the ones which dictate the OS would be used. Win98 was released in May.
Even Derek Smart stops developing DOS versions of Battlecruiser 3000AD.
The www was also a big windows ally. I remember having a perfect setup for uucp our mail, some gopher interfaces for the most savvy users, but once the web started to grow, it was all windows and trumpet winsock. Thank god for Peter Tattam!
While Windows could multi-task and had other features that were theoretically better, there was still some catching up to do with regard to available software. DOS was also more stable, until the NT kernel was integrated into Windows. Windows 3.11 was quite stable, but 95 and 98 had issues.
Windows 2000 is Windows NT 5.
Before that, there was Windows NT 3.1 (the first version), NT 3.5, NT 3.51 and NT 4.
Windows 2000 was the fifth version of Windows that did not need DOS.
If you mean the first non-DOS Windows without a parallel DOS-based line, that would be Windows XP, a bit after Win2K (2K was, I think, originally planned as the convergence version, but that plan was abandoned.)
A PX XT (8088) with the graphical GEM was absolutely usable. I was impressed by it in 1986, at a time were Windows 1 was nearly unusable, and Windows 2 (from 1988) not much better.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/IBM_PC_G...
What I am saying is much simpler: that DR didn't deliver a Mac-like GEM on the PC for the excellent reason that Apple sued them to stop them doing it. That's why PC GEM got crippled, and ended up as just a file manager/app launcher in the form of ViewMax.
(It is also worth nothing that Caldera subsidiary Lineo made GEM GPL around the turn of the century, and since then, PC GEM regained all the features Apple made DR remove and more, including Bézier curve support and things.)
All I am saying is that Atari GEM wasn't crippled, was a popular and well-loved GUI that people are still using and working on even today.
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/09/a-linux-distribution-for-doo... including some converting it to ascii
And as Windows NT was a pure 32 bit OS, where the Dos based Windows were 16/32 bits.
Windows NT was designed by Dave Cutler and released from July 27, 1993.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
By that time there were already 5 editions of Dos based Windows: 1/2/3.0/3.1/3.11.
The first Dos based Windows was released much earlier: November 20, 1985
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0x
To add to the confusion there were a Dos based Windows 3.0 and 3.1 and a Windows NT 3.0 and 3.1.
Your claim is wrong. You said that the first Windows not based on DOS was 2000; that is not true. The first Windows not based on DOS was in 1993.
What name Microsoft marketing put on it is irrelevant. If you opened a command prompt on Windows 2000 and typed `ver`, it said Windows NT 5.0.
Do not get misled by branding. As Terry Pratchett said:
"Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars. Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel like the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like ‘diplomat’ or ‘public relations officer.’ They feel they are poking fun of the whole thing." - Equal Rites
Marketing means lying. Marketing took the letters "NT" out of Windows 2000's name, but that does not mean it was the first product of its kind. It was not. It was the fifth.
BTW I used Windows 1.1 on a PC XT. At the time, my employer wanted to use computers to teach employees technical subjects (adult education). My employer was Direction Général des Télécoms (now Orange) and the department was DFPT (in Montpellier/France) (I am 65 yo).
When I saw what was needed to just program a window with a simple text I was horrified. In DOS just a few lines were enough, on Windows 1.1 it was several hundred of lines!
My company much later used software such as Macromedia to make computer based learning. It ran on (Dos based) Windows 3.11, I think (but I am not sure ) that is was DOS 4 or maybe 5.
A lot of those green screen / dos / mini computer CRUD programs were carefully designed around productivity with a keyboard.
The new windows program, on a decent screen resolution, opens instead a small window where the same fields are scattered on three or four tabs.
Even if within the same window fields can be navigated via TAB, you need to switch to the other tabs/windows and it slows down the input, as you never have a "whole" view of the data, so you have to go back through each tab to check whether you missed a field or mistyped inside a field.
Some of the best late DOS programs did a good job of optimizing for both keyboard & mouse also.
There's a cargo installation around here where they got a high-dollar mainframe in the 1970's and the data could be accessed by the few plant employees having CRT terminals. Even into the early 80's independent contractors had to do their field work by hand, and largely back in the office too since PC's were slowly adopted.
Once desktop IBMs became accepted for bigger companies, the whole shebang was rewritten for DOS by the mid-80's and their people had to get accustomed to that.
Finally with the migration (of the rest of the world) to Windows 3 and 9x, there was another DOS rewrite to handle an alternative database.
Each of these was ungodly expensive and took forever. Nobody wanted to repeat that.
Independent contractors like us were then allowed to have a copy of the key DOS modules on our laptops and the preferred procedure was to reboot to the bare metal DOS underlying the Windows 9x shell, and run the program in DOS.
Since then there really hasn't been much more to get accustomed to, each generation of everyday operators is just fine with doing things as they have always been done.
Fortunately for many hardware configurations it would also run from the command prompt window in Windows, but similarly to DOS games, this didn't work for everybody.
This is probably what has made it possible for geeks to kludge it into functionality until I had to figure it out on Windows 10 a few years ago. They were blown away when I gave them the first mouse they had in years.
Some contractors have never used it and just do without, it's only one marine terminal but it's the one where we happen to have people stationed 24/7.
So next week I have to show an IT guy how to get it to run in the latest 64-bit Windows 10 using vDOS again.
DOS really will still boot on the bare metal in BIOS mode with a CSM enabled as long as you have a well prepared Active FAT32 volume on an MBR layout storage device recognized by BIOS, etc.
And I did find the settings to get the DOS app to run from the 32-bit Windows 10 command prompt last time.
Too bad they have to use 64-bit Windows and GPT layout on the SSD, with UEFI booting.
The good emulator turned out to be vDOS.
It's fascinating to me just how long you can keep old programs going in the modern age. Emulation is such a life saver.
From the linked PDF I gather the app is written in Informix 4GL (I can’t read Czech, just guessing based on the smattering of English words-I also think in mentions some modules are written in C?). If that’s right, it is probably a character mode VT100 app running on some Unix box, not 3270 or 5250, not COBOL or RPG
Would you mind expanding on this a little?
> One failure occurred when a particular sequence of keystrokes was entered on the VT-100 terminal which controlled the PDP-11 computer: if the operator were to press "X" to (erroneously) select 25 MeV photon mode, then use "cursor up" to edit the input to "E" to (correctly) select 25 MeV Electron mode, then "Enter", all within eight seconds of the first keypress, well within the capability of an experienced user of the machine. These edits weren't noticed as it would take 8 seconds for startup, so it would go with the default setup.
Mouse UIs aren't a universal boon, and I think the recent failures at shoehorning touch screen UIs demonstrate that there isn't 'one HID to rule them all'.
It's still in use, and although it's been replaced by Linux in current products there were bugfix releases at least as recently as late 2020.
The revised license for CP/M from DRDOS, Inc this month covers "CP/M and derivatives".
DRDOS is a derivative of CP/M, as is Concurrent DOS/Multiuser DOS, and arguably the FlexOS line too.
