It's sort of fascinating how much mileage people can squeeze out of MS-DOS. A part of me always wonders about the "What If" world where GUIs never caught on, and how different the world might be today.
As close to the embedded world as possible.
I don't understand why is there so little documentation about MSDOS as a real-time operating system. I'd bet it would work beautifully for any piece of software that was developed with such use-case in mind.
I have some experience repurposing 8259 (the interrupt controller), and if you hook on the timer (8), there is nothing else to return the execution back to the 'OS'. In short I'd disagree about the real-time.
Volkov was much faster on older machines...
For today's applications? It sucks. A lot
Thread/Process control in MSDOS? In your dreams
Network? Are you running Netware? Otherwise you're SOL
Sound output? Sure, just set up DMA and IRQ yourself for your Soundblaster card. I mean, you have one of those right?
What has OS got to do with possession of some hardware?
Though even first Unixes "it's a file, just write to it" were better but just above the bare minimum
A bit trickier if you want to run on real hardware, especially since BIOS support is basically gone now. Not sure how old hardware you have to go back to to even boot up FreeDOS. I ran it on some late 00's hardware and everything runs insanely fast. I did not remember computers could be that responsive and not annoying to use.
I really can't grasp the TUI hype that is going on nowadays.
We have command completion. And the GUIs have mostly become enshitified.
Also not true for FreeBSD and GNU/Linux GUIs.
Unfortunately doing the same kind macros in GUI is a great deal more error prone.
As for CLI vs GUI, both have their places. I wouldn’t say I preferred on over the other except for when talking about specific tasks.
I’ve also been careful not to state “TUI”. Frankly I don’t see much value making a distinction between GUI and TUI in this type of conversation because they’re ostensibly the same paradigm.
In two short text files, maybe typically a few dozen lines in total (and the OS installer is likely to give you good defaults) it sets up all preferences, from command-line keyboard layout to TCP/IP to what settings DJGPP need to compile C++. There is no control panel or other annoying settings GUI to hunt for settings, just two files.
One can be considered lucky if the GUI allows the export & import of settings.
The DOS PC was really clunky, inferior, and a struggle to use compared to any of the alternatives.
At the time, I was really annoyed I couldn’t convert my DOS knowledge into Unix (Linux) shell commands - when need came.
Marriott uses a TUI based PMS at most of their hotels, it has a learning curve like a hockey stick, but once you learn it, you can literally check a guest in 5+ min faster than using Lightspeed (what most Sheratons used), its just that much faster - a big part of that is typeahead, you dont have to wait for the screen to populate to make the next selection, something that isnt true for GUI's.
Whatever folks think of Ratatui, Turbo Vison and Clipper did it first.
Re: TUIs, I wish there were more like the ones there were in DOS with CUA keybindings.
I guess I think of it in kind of the same way people think about steampunk; in that case it’s about thinking in terms of everything being steam-powered and clockwork instead of electrical and transistor’d like it is today. It’s not like most people who like steampunk would actually prefer to live in that universe, but more like it’s just a fun think to think about.