9 ms·
Thirty Years Ago: MS-DOS 6.00
- zwieback 3y agoOh, wow. I remember when it came out. My multi-configs were epic. At that time I was actually an OS/2 programmer but we also had a DOS product so some time reluctantly spent in DOS.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoCrazy that this was only 2 years away from Windows 95.
- livrem 3y agoYes, crazy that something this good could turn so bad in just two years. In hindsight I am happy their move to Windows pushed me to switch to Linux though.
- galangalalgol 3y agoWas it really ever good though? I came to dos after us having an amiga and it mostly seemed like garbage except that there was more software. Having to jave different autoexec.bat and config.sys files for every game I wanted to play, and laboriously solving the knapsack problem forneach one to get all the drivers I needed into ram.
- livrem 3y agoIn MS-DOS 5.0 and later at least you could make a menu at start-up to pick what to activate. I looked at my old config.sys and autoexec.bat recently and it was amazingly simple. 100% of system configuration in maybe 1-200 lines of text, in two files. Not so bad compared to hunting for were to configure something in any modern OS? DOS did what it had to do. For coding you could start up emacs (and ctrl-z somehow magically could drop you in a command.com shell that you could exit from to go back to emacs; I think there was a DOS interrupt to allow applications to start sub-shells like that?). And otherwise (i.e. most of the time for most of us) you just booted and started a game and then when you were done playing turned off the computer. Anyway I must admit, many years later, that many games (and some applications) around 1990 were definitely better on an Amiga. DOS games for some time were rarely the best ports. But I never used an Amiga enough to learn if I liked the operating system much. I did buy Amiga Forever some year ago and that comes with a few pre-configured disk images with AmigaOS and various applications, but I am barely able to use that at all since I have no idea how to use it. It would be fun to play with some day.
- bluedino 3y agoAnd 1 year after Windows 3.1 (which was Pretty Good)
- galangalalgol 3y agoFor work maybe? As a gamer I never used 3.1 for anything. Even the gui apps I used were dos based. Seemingly a lot of them were ported from amiga. Trying to imagine a modern os with no window manager, just applications that all used gl or vulkan directly with some unmaskable keyboard combos to allow switching.
- M95D 3y ago> Trying to imagine a modern os with no window manager, just applications that all used gl or vulkan directly with some unmaskable keyboard combos to allow switching. Can I have that? Please! Firefox won't open full-screen if started in X without a window manager.
- btrettel 3y agoThe easiest approach would be configuring Linux to do this. I have a Linux laptop without X or Wayland. It's mostly for CLI and TUI applications, but I do have some framebuffer applications like fbpdf. There are a lot of little annoyances, many of which could be fixed with a proper Linux configuration, though others require improvement to the applications. The framebuffer versions of graphical programs are unfortunately clunky compared against the conventional versions. And I'm disappointed that they don't work when called from tmux or Midnight Commander, or at least I haven't figured out how to make them work. Some key combinations don't seem to work and I haven't been able to figure out why for all of them yet. I miss having a unified clipboard. I've also become more adept at Midnight Commander and its built in editor, diff tool, and viewer. Though this exposes some issues, for example: If a file is edited with F4 configured to be mcedit, then I can switch between the editor and file manager with the screen list (Alt-`). But if I open mcedit from the command line or user menu, then the screen list will only be for that mcedit run and not include any other screens open. I rarely use the Midnight Commander screen list outside of this specific computer. (As for why I have this computer, it's to have a distraction-free setup. It works nicely for that purpose.)
- mananaysiempre 3y agoNot only that, it was a couple of months after the first usability testing sessions of the original UI of Windows 95[1] (the one with a literal "tray" under the "desktop"[2,3]). [1] https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_Usability_Testing_Builds https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_Usability_Testing_Build... [2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42583 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42... [3] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20030910_053_why_do_some_people_call_the_taskbar_the_tray.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20030910_053_...
- atombender 3y agoThe image in links 2-3 doesn't load for me. Is there an archived copy somewhere?
- cesarb 3y agoThe trick is to know that the true address of that blog was at blogs.msdn.com. Here it is, complete with comments (which were lost when the blog was moved): https://web.archive.org/web/20050924221736/http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/10/54831.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20050924221736/http://blogs.msdn...
- accrual 3y ago> In early builds of Windows 95, the taskbar originally wasn't a taskbar; it was a folder window docked at the bottom of the screen that you could drag/drop things into/out of, sort of like the organizer tray in the top drawer of you desk. The image is really fascinating to me. The whole taskbar paradigm we're familiar with today started life as what sounds like a quick hack. Draw a bar that draws the contents of a folder in a narrow bar format. Later extend it to hold running applications instead.
- mseepgood 3y agoTime passed slower back then.
- accrual 3y agoA silly pet idea I have is that while time didn't literally pass slower, there was less overall entropy in the world back then. There were fewer people working on fewer things, so less new things happened overall. Today there are more people working on more things, so the rate of new things happening is higher, and thus the perception of time passing faster.
- saulpw 3y agoAnd we are all connected, so there are not only twice as many people on the planet, and more people with computers, but also people in China, India, Brazil, and Russia are able to collaborate instead of being completely isolated in their own locales.
- dbsmith83 3y agoor the TPM role hadn't been invented yet
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoWhat's the issue with TPM? Do you hate security?
- dbsmith83 3y agoAh I wasn't talking about "Trusted Platform Module", I was talking about the technical product/project manager job, which tends to create meetings and various distractions for developers
- jmclnx 3y agoIf it was not for DRDOS 6.0, that would never have happened. DRDOS 6.0 was excellent, one thing that never got to MS-DOS was the ability to password protect files, preventing someone else to access it. Granted, that was very easy to get around, but back then the times were simple.
- livrem 3y agoDR-DOS also had some kind of limited multitasking or at least switching between tasks. I do not remember using it much or know how stable it was. I do not think MS-DOS ever copied that either?
- da_chicken 3y agoMS-DOS had TSRs (terminate and stay resident) programs, but those aren't exactly the same thing. I do recall some basic multitasking utilizing them in some way, though. My memory is too fuzzy. MS-DOS 4.0 had a multitasking release, but it was not popular and only available through retail channels. IBM didn't want it so there were OEM MS-DOS releases of 4.0 that didn't have multitasking, and that's what you got when you bought an IBM PC. This meant it didn't get a lot of support and was discontinued after MS-DOS 4.1. If it sounds like a mess, it's because this was all when IBM and Microsoft were not very happy with each other, which is kind of why everyone mostly jumped from MS-DOS 3.3 (IBM and MS mostly cooperative) to MS-DOS 5.0 (MS independent). DOSSHELL supported task switching, but only one process could execute at a time, and all tasks had to fit in memory.
- EgoIncarnate 3y agoDOSSHELL creates a swap file DOSSWAP.SWP, so all tasks don't need to fit in memory.
- da_chicken 3y agoI guess I could be wrong, but I thought that was only for DOSSHELL itself, not for the tasks you were launching. Perhaps it would work but only if the other tasks supported it?
- block_dagger 3y agoWhat about PC-DOS (the good DOS)?
- mikepurvis 3y agoI grew up with PC-DOS and I always felt slightly like a second class citizen for missing goodies that others had, like qbasic, and also there would be subtle differences when it came time to set up stuff like CD-ROM drives and sound cards. What were the good parts of PC-DOS?
- older 3y agoREXX interpreter.
- timw4mail 3y agoWhich reminds me...I was thinking about smashing MSDOS 6.22 and PC-DOS 2000 together. I wonder how well it would work to copy the MSDOS 'DOS' folder into the PC-DOS one, just keeping the programs with different names.
- hed 3y agoI really enjoyed this post. As a kid I used the MultiConfig (based on a guide in PC Magazine!) to have different menus. When all you were trying to run was games, maxing your conventional memory was key. I had different combos for sound, no sound, CD-ROM, boot to windows, moving stuff between EMS/XMS so older games could fit. I would meticulously try different combos and seeing that `mem` command return something above 600KB was a reward in and of itself.
- arnvidr 3y agoI did the same thing. I didn't have internet back then, so I assume I also got the knowledge to do this from magazines. Also, lots of time on my hand back then, so probably dove deep into various weird manuals.
- rep_lodsb 3y agoI used the "help" command that is included in DOS. Though today is the first time I learned you could have multiple "[common]" sections!
- npongratz 3y agoI was stuck with MS-DOS 5.0 as a child, and was mildly envious of 6.x's MultiConfig that I read about in magazines; it seemed so much better than using boot floppies for nonstandard configurations. So I rigged autoexec.bat to present a menu of various configs and rename the related config.sys files so that the one I chose was used after autoexec.bat ran. Worked quite well; the only minor downside I encountered was having to reboot again when choosing a different config than the one config.sys currently held.
- jbandela1 3y agoDon't forget one of the most important new utilities in DOS 6: Memmaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DOS_commands#MEMMAKER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DOS_commands#MEMMAKER It would help you change your configuration so that you maximized the amount of conventional memory. This was useful in getting games to run.
- alkonaut 3y agoI remember being the only kid who knew how to hand-craft your config.sys/autoexec.bat to play some games, and random people would call me saying they got my name of some friend of a friend.
- pjmlp 3y agoAnd DriveSpace, turning my 20 MB disk into a 40 MB, greatly appreciated as I couldn't afford buying a new disk at the time.
- ggambetta 3y agoThere was Stacker years before that :)
- stonogo 3y agoMicrosoft tried to license it, failed, and wound up licensing DoubleSpace instead. As usual, the utility being built into MS-DOS 6 pretty much destroyed competition in that space. Stacker's ace in the hole was their coprocessor card, which I coveted pretty hard..
- ralphc 3y agoWindows 95, 98 and ME can read DoubleSpace drives. If you get USB drives set up, which you can do with 95 and 98, and format the drive FAT, not FAT32, put the drive file on it, those versions of Windows will mount it.
- pjmlp 3y ago
- elteto 3y agoWoah! I remember my dad setting up a MultiConfig menu! Very neat.
- jpm_sd 3y agoPlayable Dune II, Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D??? See y'all in a week https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/ https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/
- lubesGordi 3y agoThere's a manual for Dune II in there too. I miss having manuals for videogames.
- galangalalgol 3y agoI can almost smell them. Forget new car smell, whatever carcinogens were in those things were premium ones.
- nekoashide 3y agoSome of those games were unplayable without the manuals or a map! Looking at you Star Control II! You needed a map for the coordinates to play that one.
- qubex 3y agoI remember losing the manual for Star Trek 25th Anniversary (Interplay, 1992) and that was a disaster. I eventually got a photocopy from a friend.
- marban 3y agoDon't forget the nice Lucasarts Code-wheels.
- raverbashing 3y agoInteresting, and good reminiscences I wonder what email system it was being used at the time (I mean, was it even over TCP? SMTP/IMAP?)
- Narishma 3y agoProbably over IPX/SPX instead of TCP/IP. Novell Netware networks were all the rage back then in the PC world.
- velcrovan 3y agoThirty years ago, I was twelve, and just coming to the IBM PC from the Tandy CoCo 3. The Rainbow magazine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainbow_(magazine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainbow_(magazine)) ceased publication that year, which I was very bummed about. At that early age, coming from the CoCo (which booted straight into a BASIC interpreter in less than a second) the thing that wierded me out the most about DOS was that it was not a REPL or interpreter for any language. It felt really weird to have to start up GWBASIC or QBASIC separately. I did eventually get used to it though. Not long after this I called Microsoft on the phone somehow, deepened my voice as far as it would go to sound older, and got myself signed up as a beta tester for Windows 95.
- qubex 3y agoGreetings fellow human born in 1981. I skipped the straight-to-BASIC machines (my first PC was an Amstrad 1512) and I didn’t sign up for the Windows 95 (‘Chicago’) beta but I remember queuing for it when it was released on 24th August 1995. (I later signed up to be a beta tester for Windows 2000. That was truly impressive when compared to Windows NT 4.0 that preceded it. By then I had a multiprocessor dual PIII-450 system, so gaining USB support was a great deal.)
- wdrw 3y agoI remember actually looking forward to new OS versions as a teenager. DOS 6.00 was genuinely exciting! What a contrast to the forced updates of today.
- rwmj 3y agoFun MS-DOS fact: The MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS & COMMAND.COM files had a timestamp that matched the version number (as you can see in the screenshot in this page). The file time is 6:00a [am]. In MS-DOS 6.22, the last version before it was integrated into Windows, the timestamp of those files was 6:22a.
- accrual 3y agoI happened to have a folder containing DOS 6.22 on my desktop and indeed, all the files in the DOS directory are dated 1994-05-31 06:22. Thanks for the interesting knowledge, I never noticed that! Maybe it was touch-like command run as a part of the release process.
- Dwedit 3y agoOther random MS-DOS fact, if your filesystem is badly corrupted and it attempts to read sector 0 as a directory, you will see what looks like a file named "δ<ÉMSDOS.5.0"
- tomatocracy 3y agoI'd forgotten MS-DOS 6.0 included antivirus. I have fond memories of VSAFE (I think) buzzing the speaker and warning me more or less at random about something or other (it never was an actual virus). Friends who used other antivirus solutions of the time (Dr Solomon and F-Prot were two of the other popular ones amongst friends from what I remember) ridiculed it for having so many false positives but somehow for me it was reassuring to see it was "working".
- charles_f 3y agoInteresting that a lot of the updates were actually licensed software. Deciding to (re)build a system level disk compression system the month before a major release, in an era when distribution of patches was done through floppies, was a balsy move. It also somewhat explanatory of the reputation regarding bugs of MS back then.
- glonq 3y agoIt's 30+ years later, but I'm pretty sure that I could still use "copy con" to craft a decent config.sys and autoexec.bat Having done it so many times, those things are burned into my brain forever.
- SoftTalker 3y agoContemporaneously you could have bought a NeXT computer running what would eventually become Mac OS X, instead of that pile of hot garbage.
- mikestew 3y agoAnd how many multiples over a machine capable of running MS-DOS would I have had to spend to get a NeXT? I'll let you do the math on that one, because I already did it 30 years ago. (Note: I have never owned a NeXT machine.)
- layer8 3y agoFor at least double or three times the price. And good luck running Wing Commander on that.
- SoftTalker 3y agoIt wasn't a mainstream gaming platform, true. But the productivity and development tools available would absolutely run rings around what was available for DOS. Easily worth the price if you needed it. Also, https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NEXTSTEP https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NEXTSTEP Anyway my main point was that DOS was nearly as primitive then compared to state of the art as it would be considered today.
- anthk 3y agoAnd compared to Irix the NeXT was nothing, but by the price of a basic -functional- SGI machine you could get a car.
- kjs3 3y agoI can spend several (2-3x) as much for a computer that doesn't run the software most people need? From a company with no track record? Well, at least it's pretty. You can always tell the replies from someone who only read about it on the interwebs.
- anthk 3y agoCompare what you had for DOS against what you had for NeXT and 10x less the price.
- gavin_gee 3y agodamn these were the good old days The people the leaps in tech the simplicity the naivety
- NikkiA 3y agoI think I was on DR-DOS at that point from MS 5.0 until MS released 6.20, and ISTR feeling that dblspace was a huge step down from the DR equivalent SuperStor.
- neilv 3y agoI used MS-DOS since 1.25, but I kinda wish I'd instead been using Unix all that time. MS-DOS had much better video games, but I didn't much play those. Overall, the things I did do would've been better on Unix, and I would've gotten plugged into that scene earlier. (When I finally got access to Unix workstations, I sold my PC, and never again used another MS box at home.)
- mixmastamyk 3y agoUnix was very expensive at the time of course, meaning only used by big business. I remember asking a computer/IT teacher what it was, in the early 90s. Sounded interesting and somehow we found out about Minix and downloaded it from somewhere to tinker, maybe a BBS? Luckily this happened, because when I later got an IT job in the mid-nineties at a aerospace company I was good to go. At which point I discovered Linux and then BSD.
- neilv 3y agoAlso, engineering-ish small businesses, and universities, and the occasional non-profit saving money with dumb terminals where they'd otherwise need a PC on each desk. I once paid ~$100 for Coherent (Unix-like) for my '286, then sent it back due to the 64KB process limit, while I used Unix workstations at an internship. My next home computer was to buy a used Sun-3/75 from the local Sun office, for a fraction of a what a PC would cost.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoWorked in IT in the mid-90s, was a great time and I became a sought after "expert" to free conventional memory for lab PCs connected to equipment. Did it all by hand at first with mem.exe and edit.com?, but I think in 6.0 I started also using a TUI to visualize the upper area—the helpful msd.exe: https://i.postimg.cc/2jX8LpF0/memorymap.png https://i.postimg.cc/2jX8LpF0/memorymap.png More recently in the XP era, I used the DOS multi-config menu in a classroom environment. Combined with ghost the partition imager. There was a menu that defaulted quickly to booting the current OS partition. But hit the right key at boot and you could restore the computer from a pristine pre-configured XP image. Since the images were on a primary partition it would be hidden from the end-user and not mounted for them to prevent issues. You could also update the current image and save it back to the menu partition for next time. This happened once in a while to apply windows/app updates. Worked incredibly well, until the whole classroom was dismantled around 2015ish.
- rburhum 3y agoYou just brought me back to my childhood! If you had included MultiConfig options that added Soundblaster8/Soundblaster16, with CDROM or without it... AND their complementary AUTOEXEC.BAT options that would trigger based on the CONFIG.SYS, then that would have been my system config! Without being able to squeeze every single kb of memory possible, there was no way to play Sam and Max or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, while still having a system that can boot Windows 3.1 :-)
- WorldMaker 3y agoYeah, it was great having a menu instead of a collection of different boot floppies. Though at this point I forget how much I did with MultiConfig versus once I had enough RAM what I was doing with OS/2's boot manager. OS/2 Warp 3 was wild, but mostly because it was a better way to configure DOS and/or run some DOS and Windows 3.1 apps.
- mike_hock 3y ago> LZ77 compression was fine, and hashing was fine, apparently the combination of the two became a patentable innovation lolwat
- lproven 3y agoI think there is a lot of disingenuity in this post. Microsoft was an extremely hostile, aggressive company in those times. (I have seen little to no evidence that it is very different now, but then it was famed for it, and was constantly in court for what I will diplomatically call intellectual property violations.) The real story is: * MS went to all these companies and said, in essence, "we're going to bundle your code so either give it to us free or we'll go to your rivals. But you'll make money selling updates and upgrades to all the people who get free versions!" So, as the company says, it got a free version of Central Point Backup from the PC Tools vendor, and other tools from Symantec. This was an obvious lie but many companies felt that they had no choice so they signed up. * STAC Inc was the author of Stacker, the most feature-rich and highest-compressing disk compression package. It was the only one that ran on OSes other than MS-DOS and PC-DOS -- it also ran natively on OS/2 2, where I used it myself. It also offered a hardware compression-offload expansion card, for faster data compression/decompression. (Cheap, much cheaper than a bigger hard disk in the very early 1990s.) Stac entered negotiations with MS, and very foolishly, it gave MS access to the Stacker source code. * Then, Stac management changed its mind and said no. MS copied some of the data compression code into the inferior disk-compression tools it had got from Vertisoft and shipped it. * MS denied the theft. STAC sued. STAC proved it, with the help of Geoff Chappell (among others) who just died very recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37384911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37384911 * MS had to: 1. Remove the functionality (thus MS-DOS 6.21, with no compression, followed by MS-DOS 6.22, with DriveSpace instead, with the offending code rewritten as the blog post describes.) 2. Pay Stac damages. (IIRC, ITRO $200 million.) Stac bought ReachOut with the proceeds and tried to get into remote control tech support, knowing that now disk compression was bundled, it was doomed. The effort only succeeded briefly: Stac was correct, but the future was remote control over the Internet, not direct point-to-point dialup connections which was the focus of ReachOut. * Nobody paid for antivirus updates for the DOS antivirus; if they cared, they bought a whole new antivirus. Nobody paid for an enhanced defrag, or defrag at all any more; or for backup tools, or anything else that was bundled. With Scandisk there was little need for disk-repair tools, either, so the PC utilities market cratered. The MS-DOS memory management was good enough that the market for memory management tools such as 386Max, Quarterdeck QEMM386, and the like collapsed as well. As did the market for DR-DOS: MS-DOS 6.x was perceived as a safer bet, and it was good enough, while a rival _might_ not be perfectly compatible. It was -- better in places -- but there was doubt. * CPS and the others went bankrupt, killed by MS.
- acqq 3y agoRegarding the DoubleSpace context, Wikipedia helps (1): Sept 1991: Digital Research releases DR DOS 6.0 with AddStor's SuperStor disk compression. March 1993: Microsoft introduces MS-DOS 6.0, the first with DoubleSpace disk compression June 1993: IBM announces PC DOS 6.1 November 1993: Microsoft MS-DOS 6.2, leapfrogging IBM's PC DOS 6.1 and with improved the stability of DoubleSpace. February 1994: Microsoft found guilty of patent infringement, and Stac Electronics guilty of trade secret theft. Microsoft MS-DOS 6.21, removing DoubleSpace. June 1994: After a judge ordered Microsoft to recall all unsold infringing products worldwide, Microsoft settled its dispute with Stac, and released MS-DOS 6.22, bringing back disk compression with internally developed DriveSpace, which is about 5% slower than DoubleSpace. An interesting detail: In the MS-Stac trial, "Stac’s lawyers showed a videotape of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates" "at the unveiling of MS-DOS 6.0 in which he wore a T-shirt saying, “We came, we saw, we doubled,” to underscore the importance of the compression feature." (2) A second detail, the "trade secret theft" was: Stac was found "to have committed a trade secret violation by reverse engineering features of a beta version of MS DOS that they had gotten in confidence and then using the information they gained in making their own product." (3) 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_syst... 2) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-24-fi-26671-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-24-fi-26671-... 3) https://lwn.net/Articles/134642/ https://lwn.net/Articles/134642/
- 31337Logic 3y agoI suspect this topic is going to generate a very long thre.... Oh. Nevermind. It already did. ;-) Cheers to my fellow old-farts in keeping these memories alive. :-)
- calrain 3y agoMan.. I remember all this, I was three years into an IT career when MS DOS 6 came out and it was a big deal. It's crazy to think that we will be nostalgic about today in another 30 years! How far and fast the tech scene is moving!
- snvzz 3y agoToday, we have FreeDOS[0] and SvarDOS[1], as well as the opened source code from pcmos386[2]. 0. https://freedos.org/ https://freedos.org/ 1. http://svardos.org/ http://svardos.org/ 2. https://github.com/roelandjansen/pcmos386v501 https://github.com/roelandjansen/pcmos386v501