4 ms·

Serious programmers bypassed almost all of that. The hierarchical files became important after people got what they called "hard drives".

• shadowofneptune 4y ago
  Question: bypassing graphics routines is very common to read, but how often was file I/O bypassed? I have never heard anything like that.
  • anthk 4y ago
    Games released as bootable floppies for instance.
    • Narishma 4y ago
      There were only a dozen or so of those, it was pretty niche.
• kragen 4y ago
  If you bypassed DOS's memory allocation, your program would stomp on TSRs, or if it was a TSR then other programs would stomp on it, so either way it would be super unreliable. The only thing I remember ever bypassing DOS for filesystem access was things like Norton DiskEdit, unerase utilities, and defraggers. Do you have examples in mind? (Of course lots of programs didn't use standard output.) I agree that without hard drives you didn't really need subdirectories. It's hard to fit more than a couple of screenfuls of files on a single floppy.