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Comment by mm321 | Hacker News Reader

DOS was a terrible user experience; there was this constant fight to keep all the drivers and TSR programs working, deal with high memory, extended memory and other goodies, when the system was running out of low memory. Thanks goodness we are past that. No nostalgy for DOS on my part...

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Carmack:

    We are not going to do another dos game. No amount of flaming hate
    mail is going to change my mind on this (PLEASE don’t!). The advantages
    of good TCP/IP support, dynamic linking, powerfull virtual memory, device
    drivers, etc, are just too much to overcome. Yes, all of those can be
    provided under dos in various ways, but it just isn’t worth it.

DOS was OK so long as you stayed comfortably within 640K and avoided all the pseudo multitasking hacks like TSR. The things you describe are all about pushing DOS beyond it’s rather limited fundamental design.

That said it wasn’t a great OS for it’s time and isn’t for most purposes today.

It was pretty common for people to need different autoexec.bat configurations even just amongst gamers.

Pulls up a recent LGR Video... watches griping about various expanded vs. extended vs. whatever memory issues games have

Yeeeep seems canon.

I had a batch file just to swap autoexec.bat and config.sys with *.bak counterparts depending on the game.

Yes, mostly because you were screwing around right at memory and other limits of the system. (And it was mostly games--at least for typical consumers.)

You're vastly understating just how commonly people would butt head with those limits though.

You're also forgetting just how painful it was setting up a working autoexec.bat file in the first place. Never mind having dedicated chunks of code for some games and not others (eg do I need a mouse in this game? that driver is incompatible with this other bit of software, etc), just discovering what precise string of characters in your autoexec.bat was required to load the damn driver could be downright cryptic at times.

DOS wasn't that great. We remember it with rose tinted glasses because that's what humans do. But DOS wasn't a particularly good operating system, even for its era.

Gaming on DOS, now that was fun. But I'd argue it was fun in spite of DOS rather than because of it

Once you get into games, especially beyond monochrome text-based or maybe CGA, you were already pushing the limits. DOS was an OS for essentially text-based office apps in the early 80s and it just got pushed well-beyond that over time. And, yes, it made getting it set up for anything that wasn't a lowest common denominator setup very challenging.

In which case you've basically described the vast majority of DOS's common use cases. So why even argue against my point?

Also there were plenty of text-based office apps that required their own dedicated autoexec.bat config too.

I had an elaborate batch-file based scheme for swapping in different versions of both autoexec.bat and config.sys, depending on what I needed/wanted to do.

It sucked.

Ha, me too. And although I do look back on those days with rose-colored glasses… it did kind of suck having to futz with that stuff just to get a game to load.

The hardware sucked too! IRQ conflicts and changing jumpers! And better not close the case before you verified the new settings. :-D

I think newer versions of config.sys (relatively speaking) had a menu system that greatly simplified that. It would set some environment variable to let autoexec.bat jump to the correct section too, I believe.

Ah, Wikipedia says it's since MS-DOS 6.

I don't even remember that -- but I suspect it's because by the time Win 3 was a Thing, I was working in it almost exclusively and had little need for DOS-based things. I'm not sure I ever ran DOS > about v 5.

The best thing was, a reboot took 10-15 seconds, IIRC.

on a 486 or a pentium, i think it used to take longer before that.

Yep, for me it was those damn mouse drivers that took up so much of my ems memory.

Or sometimes more commonly, an AUTOEXEC.BAT that provided the user a menu for which "mode" they wanted to boot into. Imagine having to choose between loading mouse drivers, or loading sound drivers.

Then when networking started to be more common, choosing between loading an IP stack or pretty much anything else :)

> Or sometimes more commonly

You're describing the same thing I was :)

> Imagine having to choose between loading mouse drivers, or loading sound drivers.

Indeed. This is why I don't get when people look back to DOS and say "wasn't it great".

Also the hell of having to configure sound card drivers. The commands that needed to be entered precisely with no clue about why things don't work if they don't. You'd often end up spending hours, days or weeks just getting something simple working. And most people didn't have internet access then so you couldn't just look up the problem on Stack Overflow. People moan about Bash scripts being hard to parse, autoexec.bat was a thousand times worse to work with.

DOS seems to have been the minimal effort choice of "It's like CP/M enough our users will be familiar with it" without actually considering those users. Now to be fair in 1981 that was "state of the art". The Xerox Alto was something that was way beyond reach for most people and GEOS (8 or 16bit) wasn't going to exist for another 5 years. But it was a marginal improvement over CP/M, which is about as much as one can say about it.

Modern UEFI is probably the best parallel, both in that it only really deals with text and some graphics (bitmaps only) and doesn't have any standardized interface for sound/3d.

There were better 16-bit OSs in the minicomputer world at the time but they were all priced and developed for a very different world. It would have been interesting if something like RDOS (Data General) had taken off in the PC world but that world was just so price-conscious in comparison. Heck, the 8088 was chosen over the 8086 mostly just to have a smaller data bus.

Interestingly enough, UEFI ships with UI toolkit. This can be partially customized by vendor, but essentially the idea is that for many simpler utilities and config panels, you can don't have to worry about details and just use a basic UI framework which will be handled into VT-UTF8 or GUI as needed.

don't know who said that 640K is enough, but it was very common to hit this limit in my time, around 1992-1993.

DOS extenders solved the 640K limit problem.

Windows is still a terrible user experience, you never know when it's going to stop working for half an hour or longer in order to run an update.

Sometimes those updates cause printers or other peripherals to stop functioning. Sometimes they brick your computer.

Once you have a computer working properly, running MS-DOS, Windows, Linux, etc... for the most part it stays running, forever... unless you change something.

MS-DOS 6.21 with all the drivers, SideKick loaded as a TSR, and my 26th line clock program, with a 40 megabyte hard drive was a heck of a productive environment. The only thing that sucked was that we didn't have GIT, so you had to back up your source code to .zip files on floppy disks.

I had a 300 megabyte backpack hard drive to allow me to make backups of my system, and customers. Plug that drive into the parallel port (that all computers had back then), and a book floppy, and all my stuff was right there.

Given the amount of stuff people keep publishing for UNIX terminals, I would say plenty love to live in the past.

You think the DOS shell is in any way equivalent to a modern Unix-style terminal? Why, because they're both text-based?

From the point of view of TUI fetishism, yes.

And to make a point, I started coding in 1986 and my first UNIX was Xenix.

Plus consider that "modern" Unix terminals have barely evolved over the past 30 years. My circa-1990 NeXTStation is an incredibly slow version of what we have today. I even compiled bash for it!

For some things, e.g. mass-rename, or glob select file management operations, CLIs are much faster than click-click-click GUI operations. I use both, and I don't consider it to be living in the past to use the best tool for the job rather than using the newest thing because it's new.

That is a big difference between that and living in a VT100, using VI directly from there, with a Window manager that has feature parity with twm, assuming one is used at all.

Why do you bash* them so much? In almost every thread.

Maybe because luddites slow down progress.

A pencil and rubber still work and often a modern pen is not better. FM radio "degrades" better than DAB. And so on.

They do, yet seldom do people go over the edge to keep doing 100% of their work with pencil and rubber.

TWM is quiet nice. And if we look at Windows 10 i would say it is also modern.

Imagine how much you'd be valued for that sort of knowledge!

Most of those things are a limitation of the hardware.

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