DOS is long dead, long live FreeDOS
computerworld.com.au
computerworld.com.au
In South Korea, a surprisingly large number of online merchants sell brand-new PCs with FreeDOS on it. FreeDOS PCs are usually around $100 cheaper than their Windows 7/8 counterparts, so these products have an advantage when the buyer uses a price comparison service.
The official story is that since most people nowadays already have a spare license of Windows from their old PC, they can just install it on their new PCs instead of buying Windows again. Of course, this is bullshit, because the "spare license" is likely to be an OEM copy that is tied to the old PC. But it doesn't matter, because everyone understands that you're supposed to install a pirated copy of Windows on your FreeDOS PC. So for tech-savvy Korean consumers, FreeDOS just means pirated Windows. A rather unpalatable association for a piece of free software to have, IMO.
On the other hand, if you actually install a legitimate copy of Windows, you get to enjoy a complete lack of bloatware that manufacturers usually impose on PC buyers. The PC comes with a CD that contains the necessary device drivers and nothing else.
Microsoft may or may not have anything to do with it. It might be that these PC manufacturers provide Windows for their more expensive models as a way for differentiating them from the cheaper ones. Also not all manufacturers get the same deal.
For example I bought a Thinkpad E530 without Windows on it. The other model that was available to me had the same specs, plus an extra 16 GB SSD mSata and Windows and was $270 more expensive. I got the cheaper model and I replaced the hard-drive with a 256 GB SSD, which was a far better deal.
Personally I'm glad that this happens, because I don't run Windows and it would be pretty bad if I had to pay the Windows tax.
In the US, it's possible to buy "no OS" systems from some vendors (I've picked up small form-factor systems this way), which on delivery turn out to have FreeDOS installed.
Load your preferred Linux distro and roll. Or something like that.
When was the last time you have used the B: drive?
Anyway, an interesting thing is that growing up in Russia, using DOS, we were all gung-ho about using Norton Commander and its clones, such as DOS Navigator, to supplement the vanilla command-line DOS experience.
And I'm telling you, it was oh such a great experience, that to this day, I still wonder how I manage to get by in my vanilla command line bash shell. Sure, all the auto-complete tricks are insanely useful (and maybe that's all we really needed?), but I recall the whole two-directory layout was super useful in being able to move files around and do quick edits and what not. Midnight Commander just doesn't do it for me. I tried FAR Manager on Windows, and also no dice. They all feel heavy and not as natural.
To put it into perspective, anyone who's really really into VIM, think about how you love how fast you can be with VIM, despite the obscure key combinations and the modal overhead (haha, bias showing?). Anyway, think about how once you get used to all that power, you wonder how you can survive without it anywhere else. That's what using Norton Commander /DOS Navigator was like in MS-DOS. Using a Solaris/HP-UX command line circa 1998 felt like going back to stone age.
I'm under 30 (28) and I still remember DOS and breaking (running arbitrary commands on) my Dad's work laptop, that he never used. The single greatest benefit of FreeDOS is letting me play my old games, specifically "Are You Afraid of the Dark? The Tale of Orpheo's Curse."[1] This is, still, one of the most entertaining games I've played. I replay the game every year or two as a personal tradition. Some day I'll force my kids to play it.
One of my earliest memories is my grandmother teaching me "нц" (nc, apparently the Norton Commander binary) so I could navigate my way to Tetris. (Yes, we're that stereotypical.)
I was a Norton Commander user, however I do not have such fond memories of it. Yes it was more efficient than navigating and doing stuff at the raw command line, but that's only because the command-line in DOS and Windows completely sucks in all ways imaginable.
Nowadays my command-line only feels limiting whenever I want thumbnails on my files ... like when searching for a PDF, or rearranging my photos folder. In such instances NC would be useless anyway.
Not only that, youth generation seems not able to separate the distintion between programming languages and their implementations.
They all think a strong type language (a la Pascal/Ada) with GC needs can only exist in a VM, dynamic languages (a la Lisp) cannot be compiled to native code or C like languages are always compiled to native code.
I tend to think we were able to grasp these subjects much better.
To be fair, this has always been true. Look at the old idea "Lisp is Slow", which is literally nonsense once you gain the ability to separate language from implementation.
It's always puzzled me that Norton Commander was so indispensable for DOS, but Midnight Commander is not so useful under Linux. I think the reason is just that the file-management I do these days is very different from what I needed to do under DOS; I don't have to copy files around to or from floppies to transfer them, nor do I have to shuffle files around from one partition to another to maintain enough disk space. I don't even have to navigate between all the different directories where my apps are installed, because in Linux they're all on my $PATH.
Using MC, I really miss bash's tab-completion (Esc-Tab completion isn't the same) although ^S incremental search helps. The NC copy/move/rename dialogs are really designed around the MS-DOS semantics of filename globbing (under DOS, you can say "copy .doc .bak" to make a backup of every document, but "cp .doc .bak" does something very different in Linux), so coping/moving/renaming files in Midnight Commander feels weird.
I dunno, I want to like Midnight Commander, but I just think it's a brilliantly-designed user-interface for solving problems that don't exist, or don't exist in the same form, as they did in MS-DOS.
Similarly, you can access remote systems (via ssh) as if they were local, though I'll more often use lftp's fish:// protocol. Or lately, sshfs.
Which I suppose more or less makes your point that under Linux these are mostly solved problems.
In windows 7 64-bit, you've got cmd.exe but no execution of DOS binaries (or win16 binaries, for that matter). Since you're almost always better off with DOSBox or the XP virtual environment, no great loss.
Also, Console2 makes working with the cmd prompt slightly more bearable (easier copy and paste etc).
EDIT: Console2 is nice, though. I can get behind that.
One thing that I've come so accustomed to in unix environments is the ease of creating CLI tools in a nice language like python and then glue it all together with bash scripts. I can't really imagine being so productive in DOS, but maybe I just don't know it enough, hence the question.
(Disclaimer: not the OP)
Sadly, DCL had (some) use beyond VMS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIGITAL_Command_Language
To your question, it is just as easy to write console Python tools in Windows as it is under Unix. I've written quite a few work on both.
Glue scripts (Batch files) are just fine too, as long as you don't try to do too much with them. When something gets too complex, move that part to Python, or really any language you like. To be honest I like that, I'd prefer people not write complex things in shell scripts that could be done more elegantly in a programming language.
Maybe what you mean, is you want a terminal that can display a number of well-know content-types, negotiate with an upstream process for the content, receive that as a stream of bytes, for display to the user. :)
DOS is the whole OS you boot in to.
There are plenty of good games for DOS that I still play - Heroes of Might And Magic, Star Control, Archon, Alley Cat, Digger, many others.
I'm not 100% sure, but 99%, that you'll find that it's still supported in the 32-bit versions of Vista and 7.