4 ms·
>after explaining line endings to a co-worker, she asked, "What's DOS?" How old was she? I bet there are plenty of people born in the late 80s / early 90s who'
by beervirus 6y ago
>after explaining line endings to a co-worker, she asked, "What's DOS?"
How old was she? I bet there are plenty of people born in the late 80s / early 90s who've never used DOS. Windows 95 changed everything.
- p1necone 6y agoThe averagely computer literate people that I know in my age range (mid-late 20s) refer to the windows command line as "DOS". I can't be bothered correcting them.
- moonbug 6y agowhyever? technically correct is the /best/ sort of correct.
- bonzini 6y agoWhat is DOS? Is it COMMAND.COM (of which the Windows command prompt is indeed a descendant) or the API underneath (INT 21H mostly)?
- temac 6y agocmd is rewritten. Most of DOS was in assembly language. Most of NT is not. At one point cmd maybe contained some straightforward translation to C of some pieces of assembly, but I'm not sure (I'm sure it was a mess though; it may have been cleaned up a little now) But cmd is surely quite compatible with command.com. With more capabilities, but still very compatible. And a deceivingly close user interface.
- bonzini 6y agoYeah I didn't mean a descendant source code-wise. But I would say that DOS is more the 16-bit API than COMMAND.COM.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoIt was a primitive program loader. msdos.sys, io.sys, and command.com Source is interesting, I took a look: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/master/v2.0/source https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/master/v2.0/source