8 ms·

I was a kid with not much else to do. We had a home PC and no internet connectivity. I spent so much time going through the MS-DOS manual and trying out all the

by Yhippa 5y ago

I was a kid with not much else to do. We had a home PC and no internet connectivity. I spent so much time going through the MS-DOS manual and trying out all the commands. If only I had spent that time learning Linux commands...

yokoprime 5y ago
Same. MS-DOS was such a turd of an operating system. So much time fiddling with IRQ settings and disabling stuff to squeeze out just a little more conventional memory so I could play Warcraft II
- 13of40 5y ago
  I was at a conference or something one time and saw a talk by Bill Gates, where he said that they'd tried to convince IBM to use a 68000 CPU in the original PC. Imagine what DOS could have been with a 32-bit instruction set and 16MB address space from day one. A lot of the eccentricities of DOS at the API level stem from the limitations of the hardware.
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    Then you have to explain why CP/M running on 8 bit hardware was so much better than DOS on 16 bit.
    - 13of40 5y ago
      I've had pretty limited experience using CP/M - I think the last time I actually played with it was in the early 90s when some old guy I knew was still using it to run a BBS. As far as I recall it was just as atrocious as DOS and other things of that era, at least from a UX point of view. DOS's int 21h API is a close cousin of the system library in CP/M, so I'd expect the developer experience to be kind of similar. Is there something specific you think CP/M was doing better?
      - lproven 5y ago
        It most definitely wasn't that "CP/M was an atrocious clone of DOS"! It's the other way round: DOS is a much-enhanced clone of CP/M. And TBH, in the early days of DOS – let's say up to MS-DOS 3.3 – it wasn't a lot better than CP/M. No command-line editing, no file manager, disk partitions of max 32MB, no built-in disk cache. This was the version that was a big hit and it was kinda basic. IBM built PC DOS 4.00 and MS licensed it from them. It was bigger, slower, & a bit more complicated – but it started offering improvements. It provided part of the impetus for DR to offer DR-DOS 3.41, the first widely-distributed version. It had the key improvements of PC/MS-DOS 4.00 (disk partitions >32MB being principal) but it was as small as MS-DOS 3.3 and as compatible. The DOS market only became competitive when DR introduced DR DOS 5, which integrated all the most important 3rd-party enhancements: 386 memory management, a disk cache, a full-screen text editor, and a graphical file manager... and it was sold at retail for the first time, as an upgrade to (and improvement over) MS-DOS 3.3, PC/MS-DOS 4.00 and vendor-proprietary tweaks like Compaq DOS 3.31 (which was the first DOS with >32MB partition support in the way that became standard.) MS was more or less forced to respond, which it did with MS-DOS 5 which pretty much matched DR DOS 5 feature-for-feature, including being sold at retail. The next few years they competed hard, each trumping the other on features in each release.
    - skissane 5y ago
      Most CP/M software tried to do a lot less than MS-DOS/PC-DOS software did, which made CP/M a lot simpler and easier to manage in practice than DOS was. The vast majority of CP/M applications were purely text mode, no graphics (especially not on the screen, printer/plotter graphics was somewhat more common), no sound (except the terminal bell), only supported IO devices were floppy/hard disks, and serial IO to talk to printers/plotters/modems; they managed to get by with very limited memory (many CP/M systems only had 64KB of memory, with some of that reserved for the OS or hardware; higher-end systems with bank switching could have 128KB, occasionally even up to 512KB). If your DOS applications stuck to the same limited feature set, DOS could be about as simple. But, people came to expect a lot more from DOS than that, and DOS' architecture had never been designed with those greater expectations in mind, so the end result was a complicated and difficult to manage mess. CP/M's architecture was fundamentally no better (indeed, DOS 1.0's architecture was just a slightly evolved copy of CP/M's): if people had tried to make CP/M do the things which late 1980s / early 1990s DOS systems were expected to do, CP/M would have turned into just as big a mess as DOS did.
  - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
    Have you seen the Sharp X68000? Its operating system, Human68k, is pretty much as close as one can get to a beat-for-beat MS-DOS clone on such radically different hardware.
    - buescher 5y ago
      Atari TOS under the hood of GEM was also a lot like DOS, in some ways more like DOS than it was like CPM-68K.
- spc476 5y ago
  Fiddling with IRQ settings was because the IBM PC design didn't allow sharing of interrupts (I think because they didn't expect it to be as popular as it was). Squeezing out memory was due to two design flaws---one being IBM assigning the address space above 640K for peripherals and ROMS (MS-DOS never had a 640K limit) and two being MS-DOS required memory to be contiguous.
  - Yhippa 5y ago
    Messing with HIMEM.SYS to get games to load
sedatk 5y ago
Luckily, my older brother had brought home a "Learning UNIX" book when I was a kid, which helped me learn about UNIX fundamentals years before getting my hands on a machine with it. I was fascinated with the book because UNIX sounded too advanced compared to what I was using back then (an 8-bit Amstrad CPC464). I still use the same knowledge such as managing shell background jobs, exiting vi, using tar, permissions, and so forth 30 years later. UNIX is quite magical in its consistency.
- unixhero 5y ago
  I rarely bring in anecdotes from my mum, but she said it seemed like I was learning something so arcane, as if I was learning how to run nuclear powerplants when I studied Unix at the age of 16. I still use the knowledge I learned from those books, thanks IDC and O'Reilly. I still think Sendmail and bind DNS is a bitch. I still also ridicule Microsoft, although on various points I know I am at least partially wrong. Unix and Linux, what a world.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
johannes1234321 5y ago
My brother did the same. Unfortunately the letter F came early and with it "format.exe" unfortunately the explanation in his book wasn't clear ... and there was no backup of many things.
jsz0 5y ago
I can relate to this because it's one of the reasons I originally downloaded all 14 floppy disk images required to install Slackware. I've always been a big 'just read the god damn manual' type of guy and I immediately realized there would be an endless opportunity to read a lot of manuals.

by Yhippa 5y ago

yokoprime 5y ago

Same. MS-DOS was such a turd of an operating system. So much time fiddling with IRQ settings and disabling stuff to squeeze out just a little more conventional memory so I could play Warcraft II

13of40 5y ago
I was at a conference or something one time and saw a talk by Bill Gates, where he said that they'd tried to convince IBM to use a 68000 CPU in the original PC. Imagine what DOS could have been with a 32-bit instruction set and 16MB address space from day one. A lot of the eccentricities of DOS at the API level stem from the limitations of the hardware.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  Then you have to explain why CP/M running on 8 bit hardware was so much better than DOS on 16 bit.
  - 13of40 5y ago
    I've had pretty limited experience using CP/M - I think the last time I actually played with it was in the early 90s when some old guy I knew was still using it to run a BBS. As far as I recall it was just as atrocious as DOS and other things of that era, at least from a UX point of view. DOS's int 21h API is a close cousin of the system library in CP/M, so I'd expect the developer experience to be kind of similar. Is there something specific you think CP/M was doing better?
    - lproven 5y ago
      It most definitely wasn't that "CP/M was an atrocious clone of DOS"! It's the other way round: DOS is a much-enhanced clone of CP/M. And TBH, in the early days of DOS – let's say up to MS-DOS 3.3 – it wasn't a lot better than CP/M. No command-line editing, no file manager, disk partitions of max 32MB, no built-in disk cache. This was the version that was a big hit and it was kinda basic. IBM built PC DOS 4.00 and MS licensed it from them. It was bigger, slower, & a bit more complicated – but it started offering improvements. It provided part of the impetus for DR to offer DR-DOS 3.41, the first widely-distributed version. It had the key improvements of PC/MS-DOS 4.00 (disk partitions >32MB being principal) but it was as small as MS-DOS 3.3 and as compatible. The DOS market only became competitive when DR introduced DR DOS 5, which integrated all the most important 3rd-party enhancements: 386 memory management, a disk cache, a full-screen text editor, and a graphical file manager... and it was sold at retail for the first time, as an upgrade to (and improvement over) MS-DOS 3.3, PC/MS-DOS 4.00 and vendor-proprietary tweaks like Compaq DOS 3.31 (which was the first DOS with >32MB partition support in the way that became standard.) MS was more or less forced to respond, which it did with MS-DOS 5 which pretty much matched DR DOS 5 feature-for-feature, including being sold at retail. The next few years they competed hard, each trumping the other on features in each release.
  - skissane 5y ago
    Most CP/M software tried to do a lot less than MS-DOS/PC-DOS software did, which made CP/M a lot simpler and easier to manage in practice than DOS was. The vast majority of CP/M applications were purely text mode, no graphics (especially not on the screen, printer/plotter graphics was somewhat more common), no sound (except the terminal bell), only supported IO devices were floppy/hard disks, and serial IO to talk to printers/plotters/modems; they managed to get by with very limited memory (many CP/M systems only had 64KB of memory, with some of that reserved for the OS or hardware; higher-end systems with bank switching could have 128KB, occasionally even up to 512KB). If your DOS applications stuck to the same limited feature set, DOS could be about as simple. But, people came to expect a lot more from DOS than that, and DOS' architecture had never been designed with those greater expectations in mind, so the end result was a complicated and difficult to manage mess. CP/M's architecture was fundamentally no better (indeed, DOS 1.0's architecture was just a slightly evolved copy of CP/M's): if people had tried to make CP/M do the things which late 1980s / early 1990s DOS systems were expected to do, CP/M would have turned into just as big a mess as DOS did.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  Have you seen the Sharp X68000? Its operating system, Human68k, is pretty much as close as one can get to a beat-for-beat MS-DOS clone on such radically different hardware.
  - buescher 5y ago
    Atari TOS under the hood of GEM was also a lot like DOS, in some ways more like DOS than it was like CPM-68K.
spc476 5y ago
Fiddling with IRQ settings was because the IBM PC design didn't allow sharing of interrupts (I think because they didn't expect it to be as popular as it was). Squeezing out memory was due to two design flaws---one being IBM assigning the address space above 640K for peripherals and ROMS (MS-DOS never had a 640K limit) and two being MS-DOS required memory to be contiguous.
- Yhippa 5y ago
  Messing with HIMEM.SYS to get games to load

sedatk 5y ago

Luckily, my older brother had brought home a "Learning UNIX" book when I was a kid, which helped me learn about UNIX fundamentals years before getting my hands on a machine with it. I was fascinated with the book because UNIX sounded too advanced compared to what I was using back then (an 8-bit Amstrad CPC464). I still use the same knowledge such as managing shell background jobs, exiting vi, using tar, permissions, and so forth 30 years later. UNIX is quite magical in its consistency.

unixhero 5y ago
I rarely bring in anecdotes from my mum, but she said it seemed like I was learning something so arcane, as if I was learning how to run nuclear powerplants when I studied Unix at the age of 16. I still use the knowledge I learned from those books, thanks IDC and O'Reilly. I still think Sendmail and bind DNS is a bitch. I still also ridicule Microsoft, although on various points I know I am at least partially wrong. Unix and Linux, what a world.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

johannes1234321 5y ago

My brother did the same. Unfortunately the letter F came early and with it "format.exe" unfortunately the explanation in his book wasn't clear ... and there was no backup of many things.

jsz0 5y ago

I can relate to this because it's one of the reasons I originally downloaded all 14 floppy disk images required to install Slackware. I've always been a big 'just read the god damn manual' type of guy and I immediately realized there would be an endless opportunity to read a lot of manuals.