[HN Gopher] The Life of MS-DOS
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The Life of MS-DOS
Author : ingve
Score : 69 points
Date : 2022-02-13 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (b13rg.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (b13rg.github.io)
| pdenton wrote:
| The article omits the incompatibility issues with Lotus, and the
| patent infringement lawsuit about DoubleSpace.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| It also omits mention about things like FreeDOS that's still
| being worked on today!
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| It is strange though I suppose it could be considered an
| independent reimplementation since there is no shared source.
| There's also DOSEmu and DOSBox, which while not directly
| bootable, are DOS environments.
| achairapart wrote:
| Well, the article misses version 5.0, which according to its rap-
| promo commercial[0] freed "45kb of memory at least"(!).
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmEvPZUdAVI
| malkia wrote:
| When I discovered ProDos for Apple ][/e (Actually what I had the
| was the bulgarian clone called Pravetz 8C) I was so overjoyed
| (because at school MS-DOS is what we used on PC/AT/XT machines)
| and it was closer. Then I learned that there were even more
| options!
| mrlonglong wrote:
| I've wanted to re-implement DOS in pure assembler for years to
| have that lean and mean that uses less memory than MS-DOS but
| never had the time.
| ok123456 wrote:
| The sources for MS-DOS have been floating around the net
| basically forever. The original first few releases are even on
| Microsoft's github. It largely is already in ASM. Some of the
| user programs are written in C.
|
| To me, it would be far more interesting to see what modern
| compilers and development tooling could do towards producing
| DOS programs and operating system extensions. The tooling from
| back in the day was very baroque. You had to rely on different
| mutually incomparable dos extenders to get around all the
| limitations. (Just try to find the documentation to Phar Lap
| 386 in 2022.)
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Personally for me it would be an interesting experience to
| see what and why they chose to do things they did with MS-
| DOS. One thing to try is to see if it's possible to write a
| 64 bit DOS extender.
| oso2k wrote:
| There's a couple attempts at running 64-bit in DOS. It
| usually has no benefits for old code and very little new
| 64-bit is being written and there are no libraries for
| common compilers.
|
| https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/Dos64-stub
|
| https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=15853
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Nice one, thanks.
| tored wrote:
| What would writing DOS programs and extenders with modern
| tooling accomplish? Trying to understand the goal.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Making easy to understand and maintain programs in C++,
| with compilers that can that can do aggressive
| optimizations and inlining that compilers of the day could
| not do.
|
| The STL didn't exist until the late 90s, and before C++98
| it was a wild-west.
| krkixohjk wrote:
| But what is the goal in having maintainable ms-dos
| software?
|
| The OS is still ancient and lacks most every possible
| security measure.
|
| Every program can r/w any memory and so on...
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _lacks most every possible security measure_
|
| So do calculators and typewriters. (Some people use
| computers to, gasp, perform computations, and low or no
| overhead is nice.)
| ok123456 wrote:
| The fact that it gets out of your way is a feature. Why
| does security matter on a single user, non-multitasked
| environment with no networking?
|
| The netsec industrial complex has really set back
| computing.
| xunn0026 wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment but note there were still
| viruses being circulated through floppy disks. So, 3rd
| party code may still be executed on a non-networked
| machine.
|
| Indeed, it would be awesome to see how much a machine can
| do without all the layers. Even the Intel CPU security
| fixes could be bypassed and gain some extra speed.
| tored wrote:
| Stuxnet is the modern variant.
|
| Regardless of the qualities of DOS, the user interfaces
| of the graphical programs was in many cases superior
| compared to today, everything keyboard controlled,
| clearly labeled shortcut keys, views that usually only
| did one thing, distinctive coloring.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Stuxnet happened even with all of those protection
| mechanisms in place.
| wyldfire wrote:
| MSDOS did have MMU support since 80386, IIRC. So I think
| GPs claim might be inaccurate. But it wasn't a security
| feature, it was a productivity feature. It protected your
| programs from defects in other programs and vice versa.
| This helps programmers find defects during design and
| helps users for defects that escape testing.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| DOS serves as a good bootloader for an embedded system.
| Koshkin wrote:
| E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin
| hulitu wrote:
| Taken into account how the modern compilers evolved, i don't
| have big hopes. They seem to become more bloated with every
| release.
| boznz wrote:
| The compilers have probably got better but the C language
| has definitely bloated since the 80s
| oso2k wrote:
| gcc-ia16 and OpenWatcom are both modern compilers that
| generate as good a set of code as any compiler ever did for
| Pentium and older processors. But using a higher level
| language like C means there's more than one compiler that
| can compile your DOS. That's a reason to be hopeful if
| you're a DOS developer.
| ok123456 wrote:
| constexpr code and move semantics didn't exist until
| relatively recently. These are steps towards less bloat and
| more aggressive optimization. They also can elide
| gratuitous copy construction.
|
| There are a lot of these little optimizations that are
| found in modern compilers that you could only dream about
| in 1991.
| bitigchi wrote:
| Why not contribute to FreeDOS?
| 13of40 wrote:
| It was written in assembly code:
| https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/master/v2.0/source
|
| This is a very old version, but I've seen bits and pieces of
| the last one they shipped and things like command.com and the
| "kernel" were nearly the same as this, except for maybe some
| memory management changes. What part did you want to
| reimplement?
| timbit42 wrote:
| There's not much about the life of MS-DOS there. It's mostly pre-
| history.
| marcodiego wrote:
| The DOS family tree lacks FreeDOS, the last remaining maintained
| DOS implementation.
| cout wrote:
| Where in the chart would you put FreeDOS? AFAIK it's not a
| direct descendant of any version of DOS on the chart but is a
| separate implementation.
| Yhippa wrote:
| I was a kid with not much else to do. We had a home PC and no
| internet connectivity. I spent so much time going through the MS-
| DOS manual and trying out all the commands. If only I had spent
| that time learning Linux commands...
| sedatk wrote:
| Luckily, my older brother had brought home a "Learning UNIX"
| book when I was a kid, which helped me learn about UNIX
| fundamentals years before getting my hands on a machine with
| it. I was fascinated with the book because UNIX sounded too
| advanced compared to what I was using back then (an 8-bit
| Amstrad CPC464). I still use the same knowledge such as
| managing shell background jobs, exiting vi, using tar,
| permissions, and so forth 30 years later. UNIX is quite magical
| in its consistency.
| unixhero wrote:
| I rarely bring in anecdotes from my mum, but she said it
| seemed like I was learning something so arcane, as if I was
| learning how to run nuclear powerplants when I studied Unix
| at the age of 16. I still use the knowledge I learned from
| those books, thanks IDC and O'Reilly. I still think Sendmail
| and bind DNS is a bitch. I still also ridicule Microsoft,
| although on various points I know I am at least partially
| wrong.
|
| Unix and Linux, what a world.
| yokoprime wrote:
| Same. MS-DOS was such a turd of an operating system. So much
| time fiddling with IRQ settings and disabling stuff to squeeze
| out just a little more conventional memory so I could play
| Warcraft II
| 13of40 wrote:
| I was at a conference or something one time and saw a talk by
| Bill Gates, where he said that they'd tried to convince IBM
| to use a 68000 CPU in the original PC. Imagine what DOS could
| have been with a 32-bit instruction set and 16MB address
| space from day one. A lot of the eccentricities of DOS at the
| API level stem from the limitations of the hardware.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Then you have to explain why CP/M running on 8 bit hardware
| was so much better than DOS on 16 bit.
| 13of40 wrote:
| I've had pretty limited experience using CP/M - I think
| the last time I actually played with it was in the early
| 90s when some old guy I knew was still using it to run a
| BBS. As far as I recall it was just as atrocious as DOS
| and other things of that era, at least from a UX point of
| view. DOS's int 21h API is a close cousin of the system
| library in CP/M, so I'd expect the developer experience
| to be kind of similar. Is there something specific you
| think CP/M was doing better?
| rascul wrote:
| The article mentions MS-DOS 6.3 as the latest standalone version,
| but I can't find anything about it anywhere.
|
| PC-DOS had a 6.3, but as far as I know, MS-DOS only went to 6.22
| before going to 7 (which was not shipped standalone).
| jmclnx wrote:
| IBM came out with PC-DOS 7.0 around 2000, it had fixes for the
| Year 2000 plus REX language. I still a copy of it somewhere.
| mobilio wrote:
| I also note that.
|
| Probably typo mistake from author?
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