4 ms·

> despite the fact that MS-DOS and Windows are both under control of the same company. But Windows 3.xx ran on non-Microsoft versions of DOS. They tried to sto

> despite the fact that MS-DOS and Windows are both under control of the same company. But Windows 3.xx ran on non-Microsoft versions of DOS. They tried to stop this with the release of 3.1 but ultimately failed. DR-DOS was a popular way to run Windows (although piracy was rampant, and many simply pirated MS DOS instead of buying the Cheaper DR-DOS).

thought_alarm 7y ago
It seems doubtful that Microsoft would jump through such ridiculous hoops to ensure Windows ran on DR-DOS. They did the exact opposite, and added code to detect DR-DOS and disable Windows. And in any case, it would be up to DR-DOS to emulate whatever MS-DOS was doing.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  > They did the exact opposite, and added code to detect DR-DOS and disable Windows. In 3.1. Before that Windows ran fine on other vendor's versions of DOS.
ncmncm 7y ago
No. There was never any intention to keep non-msdos systems working. Quite the contrary. But many, many users had add-on memory extenders to move things out of the memory ms-dos knew about, to leave more room for programs, or to speed up switching beween them. The CON hack was just business as usual, and hacks to keep the hacks working, like this, were stock-in-trade for people obliged to work in it the environment. Microsoft was directly responsible for a two-decade regression of progress in software system design. They did not just displace better systems; they got everyone convinced that their stuff was normal.
- stOneskull 7y ago
  i think that was a hidden cost in the decrease of computer hardware price. it's hard to know what would've happened without microsoft though. whether it would be we all used expensive hardware like macs and amigas (or ibm) or whether something like linux or a different ibm os would have become the huge thing. it was great how we could build our own inexpensive system, or buy an inexpensive ibm-compatible someone else made. i have felt grateful to microsoft for that but maybe i'm wrong and it would just be another company that ibm chose.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Cheaper was better... even with Microsoft murdering the competition, the old school companies never saw the error of their ways and kept selling stuff at a premium. We’d be discussing this on a Prodigy forum if the incumbents had their way.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Yes, I'm afraid you are wrong. OS/2, for example, ran on the same machines as W95, and was fully modern. It was easy to keep an OS/2 system running for months without a crash. But few would develop for it, because few had it. People paid absolutely through the nose for all the effort needed to keep anything working at all. Disk de-fragmenting, for example, was a Windows-only phenomenon. Consider all the Free Software we use today, that just works without attention, year after year. People had to pay high prices for Windows software because it took so much effort to get it to work at all, and to keep working when the tide changed.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      OS/2 had comsistently higher hardware requirements than MS DOS and Windows. Mainly the memory usage was way higher. This was the price you had to pay for the better system design. The MS system software of that era is a prime example of how worse is better for software products.
    - twoelfer 7y ago
      Sorry, but from my experience, this is not true. I did have several machines Running w95 and I did try to run OS/2 on them. It would boot but it would not run fast enough to work with it. W95, on the same hardware, worked quite well and responsive.
    - nootropicat 7y ago
      >Disk de-fragmenting, for example, was a Windows-only phenomenon. How? Defragmenting is needed because random access on hdd is much, much slower than sequential. It's not something the os or fs can fix.
- rasz 7y ago
  >No. There was never any intention to keep non-msdos systems working. $155 million and Bill Gates: "You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app would do that would make it run with MSDOS and not run with DR-DOS. Is there feature [sic] they have that might get in our way?" says there was https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-settles-dr-dos-antitrust-lawsuit https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-settles-dr-d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
- Theodores 7y ago
  > Microsoft was directly responsible for a two-decade regression of progress in software system design. People did buy the products rather than better stuff. However there were monopolist practices that stopped that and monopolist practices are hard to spot when there is hype and a new industry people know nothing about. If you are trying to play catch up to get on board this tech train you don't know that it's a con. I believe Microsoft's 'regression of progress' goes further back. BASIC is the real culprit. Nobody needed line numbers and goto statements, yet hobby and home computers from the 8 bit era were invariably burdened with lousy variants of MicroSoft BASIC. Including the Commodore things, even if they did not say Microsoft on boot up, they were. Fundamentally there was open source ethos at the computer club of lore, where it all started. Bill Gates cloned Basic from the PDP-11 he had access to then made people pay for it rather than just copy it. He kind of invented the notion of software piracy being evil and morally wrong. The UK home computing scene had BBC BASIC and Sinclair BASIC that were not directly derived from Microsoft's effort. The Sinclair contrivance was a super cheap BASIC hat needed the funny keyboard mappings, the BBC BASIC was actually a decent real programming language rather than just the lame Microsoft idea of what BASIC should be. The only BASIC most users knew was 'LOAD""' followed by a press of the cassette play button to load a game. MS-DOS was acquired and repurposed, sold to IBM with BASIC doing the groundwork - Bill Gates did not have an OS before then. So computing was half way there towards being open source before Bill Gates ruined it by making people pay for his clone of PDP-11 BASIC. Computers were also fundamentally networked before MS-DOS came along. Bill Gates kept it as personal computing, fleece everyone rather than share resources.
  - hakfoo 7y ago
    >I believe Microsoft's 'regression of progress' goes further back. BASIC is the real culprit. Nobody needed line numbers and goto statements, yet hobby and home computers from the 8 bit era were invariably burdened with lousy variants of MicroSoft BASIC. Including the Commodore things, even if they did not say Microsoft on boot up, they were. The Atari 800 series had a unique BASIC with unusual string-handling conventions and graphic and sound commands miles ahead of the vanilla Commodore (pre-7.0) dialects. I don't blame them for line numbers. Remember that the earliest hobbyist machines were going to be connected to who-knows-what display devices, even literal teletypes, where you might not have been able to support a full-screen editor or a convenient way to differentiate immediate versus program commands. Line numbers give you workarounds to those problems. It could be argued they languished too long-- perhaps BASICA/GWBASIC, built for a machine with standard robust display controllers and ample ROM and address space-- should have been more like QuickBasic-- but f you wanted a box-checking 8k BASIC for your new microcomputer, it's not an awful choice.

thought_alarm 7y ago

It seems doubtful that Microsoft would jump through such ridiculous hoops to ensure Windows ran on DR-DOS. They did the exact opposite, and added code to detect DR-DOS and disable Windows. And in any case, it would be up to DR-DOS to emulate whatever MS-DOS was doing.

Someone1234 7y ago
> They did the exact opposite, and added code to detect DR-DOS and disable Windows. In 3.1. Before that Windows ran fine on other vendor's versions of DOS.

ncmncm 7y ago

No. There was never any intention to keep non-msdos systems working. Quite the contrary. But many, many users had add-on memory extenders to move things out of the memory ms-dos knew about, to leave more room for programs, or to speed up switching beween them. The CON hack was just business as usual, and hacks to keep the hacks working, like this, were stock-in-trade for people obliged to work in it the environment. Microsoft was directly responsible for a two-decade regression of progress in software system design. They did not just displace better systems; they got everyone convinced that their stuff was normal.

stOneskull 7y ago
i think that was a hidden cost in the decrease of computer hardware price. it's hard to know what would've happened without microsoft though. whether it would be we all used expensive hardware like macs and amigas (or ibm) or whether something like linux or a different ibm os would have become the huge thing. it was great how we could build our own inexpensive system, or buy an inexpensive ibm-compatible someone else made. i have felt grateful to microsoft for that but maybe i'm wrong and it would just be another company that ibm chose.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Cheaper was better... even with Microsoft murdering the competition, the old school companies never saw the error of their ways and kept selling stuff at a premium. We’d be discussing this on a Prodigy forum if the incumbents had their way.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Yes, I'm afraid you are wrong. OS/2, for example, ran on the same machines as W95, and was fully modern. It was easy to keep an OS/2 system running for months without a crash. But few would develop for it, because few had it. People paid absolutely through the nose for all the effort needed to keep anything working at all. Disk de-fragmenting, for example, was a Windows-only phenomenon. Consider all the Free Software we use today, that just works without attention, year after year. People had to pay high prices for Windows software because it took so much effort to get it to work at all, and to keep working when the tide changed.
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    OS/2 had comsistently higher hardware requirements than MS DOS and Windows. Mainly the memory usage was way higher. This was the price you had to pay for the better system design. The MS system software of that era is a prime example of how worse is better for software products.
  - twoelfer 7y ago
    Sorry, but from my experience, this is not true. I did have several machines Running w95 and I did try to run OS/2 on them. It would boot but it would not run fast enough to work with it. W95, on the same hardware, worked quite well and responsive.
  - nootropicat 7y ago
    >Disk de-fragmenting, for example, was a Windows-only phenomenon. How? Defragmenting is needed because random access on hdd is much, much slower than sequential. It's not something the os or fs can fix.
rasz 7y ago
>No. There was never any intention to keep non-msdos systems working. $155 million and Bill Gates: "You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app would do that would make it run with MSDOS and not run with DR-DOS. Is there feature [sic] they have that might get in our way?" says there was https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-settles-dr-dos-antitrust-lawsuit https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-settles-dr-d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
Theodores 7y ago
> Microsoft was directly responsible for a two-decade regression of progress in software system design. People did buy the products rather than better stuff. However there were monopolist practices that stopped that and monopolist practices are hard to spot when there is hype and a new industry people know nothing about. If you are trying to play catch up to get on board this tech train you don't know that it's a con. I believe Microsoft's 'regression of progress' goes further back. BASIC is the real culprit. Nobody needed line numbers and goto statements, yet hobby and home computers from the 8 bit era were invariably burdened with lousy variants of MicroSoft BASIC. Including the Commodore things, even if they did not say Microsoft on boot up, they were. Fundamentally there was open source ethos at the computer club of lore, where it all started. Bill Gates cloned Basic from the PDP-11 he had access to then made people pay for it rather than just copy it. He kind of invented the notion of software piracy being evil and morally wrong. The UK home computing scene had BBC BASIC and Sinclair BASIC that were not directly derived from Microsoft's effort. The Sinclair contrivance was a super cheap BASIC hat needed the funny keyboard mappings, the BBC BASIC was actually a decent real programming language rather than just the lame Microsoft idea of what BASIC should be. The only BASIC most users knew was 'LOAD""' followed by a press of the cassette play button to load a game. MS-DOS was acquired and repurposed, sold to IBM with BASIC doing the groundwork - Bill Gates did not have an OS before then. So computing was half way there towards being open source before Bill Gates ruined it by making people pay for his clone of PDP-11 BASIC. Computers were also fundamentally networked before MS-DOS came along. Bill Gates kept it as personal computing, fleece everyone rather than share resources.
- hakfoo 7y ago
  >I believe Microsoft's 'regression of progress' goes further back. BASIC is the real culprit. Nobody needed line numbers and goto statements, yet hobby and home computers from the 8 bit era were invariably burdened with lousy variants of MicroSoft BASIC. Including the Commodore things, even if they did not say Microsoft on boot up, they were. The Atari 800 series had a unique BASIC with unusual string-handling conventions and graphic and sound commands miles ahead of the vanilla Commodore (pre-7.0) dialects. I don't blame them for line numbers. Remember that the earliest hobbyist machines were going to be connected to who-knows-what display devices, even literal teletypes, where you might not have been able to support a full-screen editor or a convenient way to differentiate immediate versus program commands. Line numbers give you workarounds to those problems. It could be argued they languished too long-- perhaps BASICA/GWBASIC, built for a machine with standard robust display controllers and ample ROM and address space-- should have been more like QuickBasic-- but f you wanted a box-checking 8k BASIC for your new microcomputer, it's not an awful choice.