MS-DOS is 30 years old today | Hacker News Reader

MS-DOS is 30 years old today

extremetech.com

102 pointsukdm27 comments

Sweet DOS memories. I could probably still remember how to write CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that wring out every possible byte of <640K memory so that Ultima VII would run. (This game had a home-grown memory manager which required an obscene ~620K of so-called "real" memory while also requiring certain drivers that ate into that real memory, making it difficult to run the game without manually customizing the DOS startup command files.)

ahem.

LOADHIGH=c:\mouse\mouse.sys

On my PC it required something else, making the boot files not quite that trivial. Maybe it was the sound card, or maybe it was due to the oddball MicroChannel bus and ESDI hard disk on that IBM PS/2 -- I can't remember.

I'm glad we don't have to do that stuff anymore just to play a game.

No, it was DEVICEHIGH= in config.sys to load .SYS drivers, and LOADHIGH (without an equals sign) in autoexec.bat to load an .EXE.

I always had the same experience getting TIE Fighter to run. Mostly it was a combination of LH's and DOS=HIGH,UMB which did the trick.

That and a trial and error process of reordering CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT entries along with interactive boot which always reminded me of that scene from Apollo 13 when they are trying to determine the powerup sequence for the command module.

As soon as I saw this I was going to post about AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, the joy and pain of which were only surpassed by the hardware jumpers that occasionally tagged along. Long live DOS!

Ah, the wasted hours of IRQ mole whacking to make the sound card AND the cdrom drive to both work at the same time ...

C:/Dos C:/Dos/Run Run/Dos/Run

Happy birthday Dos. I still remember learning you to play Commander Keen, when I was 5.

You mean C:\Dos ? ;)

Nowadays it'd have to be C:\/Dos... damn web-based OSes...

Brings back memories of programming QBasic in the MS-DOS shell on Windows 98. Ah, those were the days.

You should check out FreeBASIC and Qb64. Maybe you can revisit some of those memories. :)

I remember learning VGA programming in C and assembly language how it was instrumental in helping me finally grasp just how low-level C really was. That's when I finally realized what pointers really were and just how useful and dangerous they could be.

sounds like you went through a similar routine to me. I had the Norton book - which was excellent. I had second hand or pirated copies of everything though.

my first thought on pointers was 'this can't be right because it is too dangerous, i can write a program to do anything!'

Probably the best legacy of MS-DOS is the number of kids it taught how to really use a computer.

When I got my first PC (486SX 33MHz FTW!) the ONLY way to run the best games was to get down & dirty with the command line. Soon you'd learn how to edit autoexec.bat/config.sys and how to zip big files to span several 1.44MB disks. Before you know it you're playing with BASIC, hex editing save game files & learning how to set up all sorts of ad-hoc networks with friends. Then came Doom & DEU & things really took off…

Those of us that wanted to see the latest 'cool-shiny' stuff on our computer had no choice but to learn about the ugly innards, & we got pretty good at this 'hacker' stuff as a result ;)

Ah, the innocuous days of MS-DOS. Best game was definitely Flight Simulator IMO. I remember playing it for hours every day with my Logitech joystick. By the way, that joystick has a free game called Slipstream 5000 with it. Anyone else remember playing that?

> Thirty years ago, on July 27 1981, Microsoft bought the rights for QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for $25,000.

I have yet to see a definitive date for the creation of MS-DOS. This is just the date QDOS was purchased.

I run a public "Geeky Events" calendar[1] and the research I've done points to August 12th as the first date "MS-DOS" was created, but even that isn't 100%. Does anyone know the actual date?

[1]: https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=9t07jqib63if4k...

Congrats MS-DOS!

I may not remember correctly, but wasn't it that MS-DOS 4.0 was replaced by 4.01 two days later or so?

Also, typo below the MS-DOS 2.0 picture: It should be 5 1/4" (the floppy with the half one was 3 1/2").

Yea, the problem was the original 4.0 release was buggy.

The entire 4.0 release was considered pretty sub-par - it was common practice to remain on version 3.3 until 5.0 was released.

You can't really tell from the picture, but actually per the original page it was actually 8-inch. You see, the MS-DOS disk is not for the IBM PC, but for the SCP 8086 card based S-100 system SCP 86-DOS was originally developed on before MS bought it. Anyone else remember it?

Thanks DOS. When I first saw a computer I thought it was a type of typewriter.

To celebrate, I'll buy the first round of drive letters and back-slashes.

Take them. Take them all. Please.

My first encounter with viri. The waterfall virus and michelangelo.

Getting Wing Commander to run with sound and a joystick was fun.

MS-DOS was my first experience with a computer. Great times.

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