2 ms·

I feel like most of the folks on the DOS nostalgia train are people who didn't actually live through that era trying to make all those things work. As you note,

I feel like most of the folks on the DOS nostalgia train are people who didn't actually live through that era trying to make all those things work. As you note, it was finicky, crash prone, and very very annoying to work with. We did have fun, but we would've had more fun on a more capable, less slapdash OS. Which is why so many of us abandoned Win/DOS at our first opportunity -- either on (likely university-owned) Unix or BSD hardware, or on early Linux, or for some to the Mac or Amiga or even Atari, all of which were empirically better platforms than DOS/Windows at the time EXCEPT for gaming.

polpo 5y ago
I wouldn't paint with such a broad brush. I've recently gotten way into retrocomputing, DOS included, I absolutely lived through that era. I spent my formative computing years in the early to mid 90s deep in DOS, mostly playing games, watching demos, listening to and writing tracker music, and doing pretty rudimentary C/C++ programming. At the beginning of this year, I built an AMD K6 machine, got my Gravis Ultrasound card working again (which involved ordering a replacement mixer chip from China), and have had an absolutely wonderful time reliving my early computing experiences. And yes, that also includes fiddling with IRQ settings, maximizing low DOS memory, etc. Would I do day-to-day work in this kind of environment? Hell no! But it's a really fun distraction.