MSDOS -- the good old days

Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy.
This forum is not for asking programming related questions.

Moderator: General Moderators

Post Reply
alex.barylski
DevNet Evangelist
Posts: 6267
Joined: Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: Winnipeg

MSDOS -- the good old days

Post by alex.barylski »

http://www.pcworld.ca/news/column/4a0ba ... 25/pg1.htm

Not really the good old days...I remember having more problems than anything...stupid

autoexec.bat
config.sys

caused me soooo many headaches and my dad to constantly take away my computer privileges...when the computer stopped working as expected. LOL

I love reading timeline stories like that...I find technological evolution so motivating and fascinating. :)
User avatar
Ollie Saunders
DevNet Master
Posts: 3179
Joined: Tue May 24, 2005 6:01 pm
Location: UK

Re: MSDOS -- the good old days

Post by Ollie Saunders »

That was cool. I associate DOS with my childhood. It reminds me of a lot of the games I used to play at the time: Wolfenstein, Doom, the original C&C. Ahh they were all so great.
alex.barylski
DevNet Evangelist
Posts: 6267
Joined: Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: Winnipeg

Re: MSDOS -- the good old days

Post by alex.barylski »

I never really played games on my old machine, although I did try installing Flight Simulator 4.0 or 5.0 but needed to install the HIMEM.SYS driver or some damn thing so DOS was capable of accessing memory above 640K which is where most of my troubles with config.sys and autoexec.bat came from if I remember correctly.

I did eventually get the game running but it was on a 386 not an 286...LOL

Our first "computer" if you can call it that, was Comodore Vic-20...with 1Mhz processor...it's funny cause when I read or watch shows about old technology I always remember that damn computer when my dad bought it. I couldn't have been more than about 4 or 5 years old but I still remember playing this space wars game on it with my sister.

Memories. Here I sit browsing the Internet with a laptop which is several billion times faster than the old Vic...

It's like looking at an old Vikkers Viscount airplane colored in Air Canada colors and an A320 in the livery. It's such an odd sensation I get from that.
Doug G
Forum Contributor
Posts: 282
Joined: Sun Sep 09, 2007 6:27 pm

Re: MSDOS -- the good old days

Post by Doug G »

I still have a few clients running a DOS 6.x based server application.

The timeline for DOS goes back to at least the 1960's in reality.
In the early 1960's OS/8 from DEC ran PDP/8's (and was based on some other OS I think)
RT-11 for the PDP-11 16bit computers was pretty much a port of OS-8.
In the 70's, CP/M was pretty much a copy of RT-11 for non-DEC microprocessors.

And now the article picks up ... (yep, I have 1st-hand knowledge of these systems) :)
Post Reply