The History of DR DOS | Hacker News Reader

The History of DR DOS

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100 pointsklelatti45 comments

Basically MS/PC-DOS was there and it was "free." And its (many) shortcomings could be overcome by a ton of cheap or free add-on utilities for power users who were so inclined.

It's also amazing how many Caldera tentacles snaked into so many things.

Ehhh it's a stretch to say all of MS-DOS's shortcomings could be over come by add ons. Many were intrinsic to the OS and fixes could only be simulated so long as programs and users agreed to abide by the band aids. It's also why so many things even in Windows 11 today are inelegant kludges to maintain backwards compatibility.

Fair enough. There was definitely a step function to even "real" 16-bit OSs of the minicomputer world (and ultimately *nix) that was just hard to make because of path dependency.

The era of it having a port of Mac System 7 is so interesting, somewhere there must be disks with that on it (project Star Trek).

Who is still alive that might have it?

Probably some developer still has a stack of floppy disks with the source code on it. Issue is, they aren’t supposed to, do they want to risk getting in legal trouble with their former employer over it?

These floppies won't be readable forever.

There's a level of moral obligation to do preservation.

The problem is that copyright laws were not designed to encourage historical preservation, at least not for computer software. Source code escrow should be a condition of copyright for closed source software.

Apple gave versions up to 7.5.3 for free on its page. Not libre, but there's Executor (a fork of it) under Github which can run System 6/7 binaries.

That’s not what we are talking about here. We are talking about the unreleased “Star Trek” project in which Apple ported System 7.1 to run on top of Novell DOS 7 (descendant of DR-DOS) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

We're talking about something else entirely.

But even for "up to 7.5.3", it is just binaries; no source code.

> But even for "up to 7.5.3", it is just binaries; no source code.

There is a leak of the System 7.1 source code floating around, although apparently it is missing some major components (such as the 68K emulator for PPC Macs)

Might need 7.1.2 for that.

Sounds like that never made it to market. Would have been great for me at the time, I was stuck having to trade my Outbound notebook in for a PC one because I couldn't get system 7 on it, and 7 was a game changer compared to 6 (Multi-tasking!!). Would likely have never left mac if it weren't for that.

Worth nothing that DRI's GEM was used as the default desktop environment on the Atari ST, so was actually quite successful this very popular home computer. In fact I owned an ST and used GEM and had no idea it was a product in its own right: I always had assumed it was part of the prouduct that Atari made.

GEM was relatively successful on PCs too, for a brief time when DTP packages like Timeworks and Ventura Publisher required it.

I remember installing Windows on new PCs that came with DR DOS in th early 2000s.

Always wondered why they didn't come with Linux.

Because early-2000s Linux was made by techies and geeks for techies and geeks. Windows and Mac succeeded because they had a GUI for nontechnical users and didn't require an inordinate amount of futzing in the terminal to use.

Even discounting Android, Linux is much better nowadays, but in the early 21st Century, it was temperamental and finicky enough to install and use that it scared away nontechnical users.

The big problem with 90s/early 2000s Linux was drivers. Which is still a problem with 2020s Linux, but significantly less of a problem than it once was. However, if a hardware manufacturer wanted to support Linux, they could develop/test the required drivers, and install them preconfigured. The real issue was they didn’t perceive there being sufficient market demand to make it worth their while investing in that

It has gotten better-I remember having to muck around with modelines in X11 (not sure if this was 1990s or early 2000s-you get to a certain age and the decades start to blend together in your memory)-but who has to do that nowadays? Still, a HW manufacturer preinstalling Linux could have done that for you

Modelines weren't that complicated, just rather technical. Also there was a tool helping with that. Still is, but another, called 'cvt', which today still can be useful with strange setups, or to shift frequencies just a little bit, so you don't have coil whine anymore :-)

> Because early-2000s Linux was made by techies and geeks for techies and geeks. Windows and Mac succeeded because they had a GUI for nontechnical users and didn't require an inordinate amount of futzing in the terminal to use.

Are you trying to tell us that a dos operating system was better because it didn't involve using a command line to use?

OpenSuse and Mandrake were already a thing in early 2000's and they were pretty much targetting any user, offering YAST and drakconf that were extensive gui tools to configure pretty much everything on a linux system. You had little to do on a terminal already if you chose your distro correctly. Also if you bought the box version it came with a book guiding you through pretty much everything. [1]

Arguably the biggest hurdle/struggle on linux at the time was getting internet connection through a winmodem but it was a struggle that wasn't better solved with a DOS operating system.

[1] My theory is a lot of people have struggled with linux in the early years because they just got the CDs from magazines, then later downloaded the ISO versions, instead of purchasing the complete box versions with full documentation. How do you consult online documentation if you only had one computer, smartphones weren't a thing yet and you couldn't get the damn modem or gui working? Dual booting was the only way but this is the kind of experience that makes you soon grow tired of rebooting and give up if you don't get stuff corrected quickly.

Debian Sarge had offline docs of everything. The 3 DVD version I bought had a small book and apt and synaptic were already there, along mentions to the handbook and dhelp/dwww.

While mandrake and suse where expensive, some editors released compkete dvd sets for 20 eur, around $15 or 20 for its day.

Most people simply didn't knew to look for it, like the freebsd handbook.

Lots of distros were sold on book stores with a small intro manual. They had points on how to install the docs thru apt.

When the post I'm replying to is "I remember installing Windows on new PCs that came with DR DOS in the early 2000s," then yes.

Because those were people trying to escape the command line, or they would not have been using Windows.

> didn't require an inordinate amount of futzing … scared away nontechnical users

You write that as if past tense.

We knew this was a problem which spawned lindows in the early 2000s (now known as linspire). I was lucky enough to see some stores carry desktops with it preloaded.

Didn't seem to sell very well though

Yeah, Linux was horrible compared to the brilliant n00b-friendly user experience DR-DOS. Tons of non-tec and non-geek people just loved the DR-DOS experience.

The poster I was replying to was talking about installing Windows, not using the DR-DOS command line.

I seem to recall Microsoft being a bit scared of Linux in the early 00s. I'd guess installing DR-DOS on Windows-less PCs seemed less likely to piss off Microsoft and losing their contracts/licenses than installing Linux would have.

I was really happy with Windows 2000 (not to be confused with ME) myself. I mean it wasn't perfect for games, but was pretty great for general use and a lot of games did actually work.

And yeah, MS was particularly adversarial to Linux (and any other GNU licensed software) around that time. I've softened a bit on it, but will generally prefer BSD/ISC licenses over GPL for anything I can. Don't mind it for complete apps, but avoid it for libraries.

...did you use early 2000's Linux? Drivers barely worked.

It was only when you needed cups and wifi support that you really needed to work at it.

Sure graphics had two drivers to choose from and you had to craft your X11 config by hand but that taught character and perseverance

You must be young! I did run graphical Linux 1997 as my main driver. The distribution was a black hat something, you used a rewrite tool to create a boot floppy which would boot the CD ROM later.

It came with at least three DEs, olvwm and xfce and whatnot.

Driver were never of an issue for me maybe just luck.

I used it in the late 90s as well.

It was definitely luck.

I've been using Linux almost exclusively since 1994.

Lack of drivers was definitely a problem but it made me spend a lot of time researching whatever I bought first. Lots of reading Linux HOWTOs and Usenet forums about whether a particular card was supported or not.

I had to install from 30 floppy disks because my brand new IDE CD-ROM wasn't supported for another 6 months. Same with my new Diamond Stealth 64 graphics card. I had to wait 6 months to be able to run X11

Those both came with my new Pentium 90 PC. After that I bought hardware specifically for Linux like my BusLogic 948 SCSI card

From 2000 to 2004-5 (2.4 yo 2.6) the change on supported hardware was huge.

Debian 3.1 was tons better than 3.0. Miles ahead.

When IBM released the Personal PC it offered MS-DOS for $40 and DR-DOS for $240, thus neutering DR-DOS. Back then $200 was a lot of money for something that looked and worked very much like MS-DOS.

That would be CP/M-86. It also missed the launch window for the IBM PC and wasn’t available until six months later, so PC-DOS had every opportunity to establish itself.

As the article notes, DR-DOS didn’t become a product until many years later.

Except that $240 price point was negotiated by Kildall, he simply didnt expect Microsoft to sell something as important as Operating System for the price of Atari game.

DR-DOS was great but it could not run Windows.

As DR-DOS 5.0 owner, it run Windows 3.1 just fine.

You are referring to Windows 95 trick from Microsoft, regarding DR-DOS 6.

I think you are probably referring to a beta of Windows 3.1 which deliberately barfed if run on any version of DOS that wasn't MS-DOS. That code was never included in any final non-beta product.

Windows 95 doesn't care what version of DOS you have because it replaces it with its own - MS-DOS "7.0".

I don't think Windows 95 could run on any other dos without a lot of hacking and highly specific expertise?

Second part of my comment.

This book has the background history about it, if I remember correctly.

https://archive.org/details/unauthorizedwind00schu_1

And there was the whole court case.

https://www.wired.com/1999/06/more-legal-trouble-for-microso...

I see. I ran a version of DR-DOS that wasn't compatible then.

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