Richard Bonner wrote on Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11
7:49 +0000 (UTC):
> BillW50 (BillW50@aol.kom) wrote:
>
>> John Doue typed on Tue, 20 Jul 2010 0929 +0300:
>>> I am surprised Richard did not mention DOS ... I seem to remember
>>> he is a big fan of it. What would your stats be? .
>
>> Hi John! Yes I too am surprised that Richard didn't recommend DOS as
>> well. And DOS was doing well up to about the year 1993, when Windows 3.1
>> came out. And Windows 3.1 was so good at the time, it did away with
>> other competitors like GEM, GEOS, and even hit OS/2 hard.
>
> *** That was more marketing than it being so good. OS/2 was ahead of Win
> 3.x in multitasking and multithreading, at the minimum. I had 3.1 and had
> issues with it - especially with resource memory limitations. Eventually,
> it would not boot properly, so I dumped it.
Not so at all! I was a beta tester and things were going fine right up
to the final release of OS/2 v3 (aka Warp). IBM in their silly wisdom
changed many of the drivers and didn't even beta test them. It was a
disaster! Many of us (myself included) couldn't even get the release
version to install at all.
IBM promised a money back guarantee. Yet when I tried to get IBM to
refund, IBM later said sorry you bought it and it is now yours! I don't
know of a single person who ever got a refund. And I finally got it
working, not from CD, but making all of those stupid floppies and
replacing the OS/2 Warp drivers with the older beta drivers. What a
nightmare!
And OS/2 wasn't stable at all! I was saying this since day one. It
routinely crashed and burned all of the time. I complained about it all
of the time and nobody listened. I lost tons of work for a number of
years due to OS/2 instabilities. IBM claimed it was my hardware.
Although they were a bunch of morons, because completely changing the
hardware to something else caused the same unstable nonsense.
After two years later after I was the only one talking about this OS/2
instability which made OS/2 the most unstable OS that mankind ever seen.
I was finally vindicated a couple of years later! But I never got any
apologies or anything. And that is right, all of those bozos at IBM had
finally found what I was talking about about a couple of years later.
And it was far worse than I even thought. Not only did it effect every
system I ever tried, but *all* systems. As if you copy and paste between
OS/2 and a DOS session, this caused the GUI to be in a totally unstable
state. And you didn't know when it would happen, but the whole system
would lock up sooner or later.
Supposedly it was finally fixed in about Fixpak 35. But after two years
of hell with OS/2, I called it quits. Windows 3.1 was far more solid and
you didn't have all of those other OS/2 problems like the sound card
could only access one session only (unless you had a special sound
card). What a much of nonsense.
Worse OS/2 Warp says right on the box that OS/2 supports 256 colors. It
did not for many. Mine only worked in 16 colors. Ever work in a Win-OS/2
session with only 16 colors? That is awful! Can't view pictures or
anything correctly.
So it had taken me 6 months to write a driver for my Headland 512 video
card to get 256 colors. That is pretty damn sad that the user has to
write their own driver(s). How are you going to get the masses to use an
OS that way?
OS/2 Warp was really one of the biggest disasters ever! Virtually every
time IBM released a new Fixpak, it broke so many things. and it wasn't
easy to undo a fixpak and it was far better just reinstalling from
scratch once again. I did this hundreds of times with OS/2.
And even worse, old bugs that were fixed later came back in later
Fixpaks! Clearly IBM was totally clueless how to fix something and just
plugged in the old Microsoft code back in. What incompetence!
And IBM tricked people to make them believe Windows 3.x was more
unstable than they had remembered. As when you booted up Windows 3.x
alone, IBM swapped the original Win.com with their own Win.com and never
bothered to switch it back. And their Win.com gave you 80+kb less
conventional memory than the original Win.com did. Thus Windows 3.x was
really unstable under these conditions. Just one of many IBM tricks to
make you believe Windows itself was really unstable.
I could write a whole book on the disasters of OS/2. It was the worst OS
ever created. Well once IBM had taken over from MS anyway.
>> Why GEM and GEOS didn't bother to improve and compete against Windows,
>> I have no idea.
>
> *** It was the same as with DOS, Microsoft quashed the competition with
> its "DOS is Dead" campaign. That really hurt Digital research which had
> both DR-DOS and GEM. Microsoft was always playing catch up with DR-DOS,
> so they had to quash it somehow. (I use a newer version of DR-DOS to this
> day.)
The only people that hurt DR was DR themselves! DR promised there would
be CP/M-86 and nothing happened. So Tim Patterson couldn't wait anymore
and whipped up QDOS. And thank goodness too. And DR probably would have
never written CP/M-86 if Tim didn't do it. DR was funny that way.
And I was busy in '84 and '85 writing a powerful office suite for CP/M.
Yet Gary Kildall in one day without warning killed his own baby! Two
years worth of my work right down the drain! What a moron!
And do to competition to PC-DOS and MS-DOS, DR finally got off of their
butt and created DR-DOS. So who was playing catch up Richard? It was DR,
not Microsoft. And DR's GEM was just awful! And they even abandoned it
before Windows even got popular. But Gary loves to kill off his projects
and burn his customers and other developers over and over again.
And who was playing games Richard? DR teamed up with GEOS. And GEOS
didn't work well with MS-DOS on purpose, but did really well with
DR-DOS. Well this backfired as you ticked off your customers and they
both went down the tubes in flames. So much for DR's promise of lifetime
support, eh?
And DR-DOS was always lacking behind MS-DOS the whole way. What you are
talking about was DR-DOS included utilities that MS-DOS didn't have
right away. But that is a job of third party developers and not the job
of the OS developer. MS encouraged competition while DR squashed them.
Remember this is were Norton and others were born from.
> I should mention that DOS continued to do well into the late 1990s.
> Sales of DOS software exceeded those of all other operating systems
> combined.
Nope not so at all. All of the big name DOS developers switched over to
Windows in the early 90's. Names like WordStar, Word Perfect, Lotus
1-2-3, etc.
> DOS of course continues to this day, but mainly in embedded
> systems and in retail POS setups. Still, consumer DOS software is
> available. My graphic browser has a date of 2008, and my USB drivers
> and 4DOS are 2009. Speaking of USB, an even newer driver (from another
> source) was released just last month.
You had to wait until 2008 for a DOS browser? Until 2009 for USB
support? And your never going to convince me they are even close to the
GUI counterparts.
>> And to be honest, under DOS I can't do as much as I could with it back
>> in 1993. That is because many of those programs don't even work on newer
>> hardware for one.
>
> *** What version of DOS are you using? Try a newer one.
I have many versions, pick one. DOS doesn't support long file names,
NTFS, huge drives, etc.
>> And the ones that get you online like AOL for DOS
>> (which was really a GEOS application) won't even get you online for over
>> a decade now. Worse, it only works on dialup and that is all. No browser
>> either if I remember correctly.
>
> *** Yup, that stuff is pretty old.
Most DOS stuff is pretty old. As most DOS development came to a halt
right around 1994. Some stopped earlier than that.
>> So my stats for DOS would be that DOS would only allow me to do 1% of
>> what I want to do. Pretty sad, eh?
>> --
>> Bill
>
> *** Hmm, well given that DOS does 95% of what I and my company do, I
> would have to say that your DOS setup is not up to snuff, Bill. (-:
No there is no DOS setup in the world to do what I am doing now under
Windows. You have that backwards. And maybe you like all of the
limitations under DOS, but I sure don't. Like separate printer drivers
for every single DOS applications is a terrible way to do things for
one. And being stuck with one character set is also so bad. Why in the
world would you want to limit the possibilities for is beyond me.
There is always going to be a niche out there like you. As I am sure
there are a small number of people still using Apple IIs, Commodores,
CP/M, Atari 2600s, etc. But add them all up and even throw in Linux for
good measure, they all still don't add up to 1% of the computer users.
And in anybodies world, that is a niche.
--
Bill
Asus EEE PC 702G4 ~ 2GB RAM ~ 16GB-SDHC
Xandros Linux (build 2007-10-19 13:03)
