MS Dos is 30
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God I am getting old, who remembers spending hours getting programs to run in extended memory?
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
I'm younger than MS-DOS is but I still remember as a young child spending hours every time I was brought a new game getting the thing to run. Extended/Expanded, himem, and then along came things like privateer and x-wing that wanted 600k of more of memory to run (I became a master of the autoexec.bat). I actually kind of miss it in a strange way, when you finally got them to run, it made those title sequences all the more rewarding. Anybody use GEM & Xtree?
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God I am getting old, who remembers spending hours getting programs to run in extended memory?
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
My final MS-DOS applications ran in protected mode, using the same DOS extender as the game DOOM[^]. These apps implemented bimodal interrupt handling (interrupt services in both real and protected mode to avoid mode switching), ran under both MS-DOS and DOS/V (a Japanese version of MS-DOS), and communicated with three of our commercial ink-jet printers via parallel and serial ports simultaneously. We could ship several 100K of data per second to those printers on a very modest industrial PC with a 600MHz processor and only 8M of RAM. Interestingly, even though these applications haven't received any maintenance since 2001, we are finally end-of-life'ing only this year.
Software Zen:
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God I am getting old, who remembers spending hours getting programs to run in extended memory?
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
I started out with DOS 6.22, DOS SHELL was amazing, F10 for the menus, the file manager with folders on the left files on the right. 20MB HD, then onto Windows 3.11. Spent hours (if not days) getting custom bat files in place to run Maxi, Microprose, and loads of other games via booting from a floppy. I've used every version of windows since (currently 7 on the desktop and 2008 r2 server running various vm's). I remember showing off to my friends by typing pointless commands like 'ver', creating pointless batch files with text via echo statements, then onto the magical world of C/C++ with menu based systems and Dos style windows. I feel ancient now, my phone (Windows Phone 7 HTC HD7) has a faster cpu, more space, better everything than the first pc I built in 1997 for £750ish which was a 486 133mhz, 4gb, 16mb ram power house!
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Got to say that the IBM was excellent. And very sturdy, especially the keyboard. We did the upgrade from twin floppies to a 20Mb hard drive. Wow! 20 whole megs! I was in Silicon Heaven. :)
------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] Trolls[^]
Can remember the first I worked with It had been upgraded to 640k RAM from its original 64k (i think), and to a 10Mb hard drive and dual 360k floppies from the original single 180k one - oh and up to CGA graphics - don't ask me what that was originally. Running at the huge speed of 4.7MHz It was also vastly outperformed by my BBC micro 32k ram and 1MHz processor on just about every point.
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God I am getting old, who remembers spending hours getting programs to run in extended memory?
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
You think your getting old? I remember in my first year of college loading instructions and data using 8 toggle switches! up hill, both ways! ;P
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Got to say that the IBM was excellent. And very sturdy, especially the keyboard. We did the upgrade from twin floppies to a 20Mb hard drive. Wow! 20 whole megs! I was in Silicon Heaven. :)
------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] Trolls[^]
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You think your getting old? I remember in my first year of college loading instructions and data using 8 toggle switches! up hill, both ways! ;P
Yep, punch cards (dropping your stack and having to reorder it all), punched paper tape (over a 300 baud phone modem on the ASR-33 teletype), Apple II DOS and 6502 machine language. Those were the days. Then came the infamous IBM PC with "dual floppies". My first 20mb drive was $400. Then the IBM AT came out and we could pop in faster crystals from Radio Shack to pump the clock. DOS was our world then.
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God I am getting old, who remembers spending hours getting programs to run in extended memory?
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
Bergholt Stuttley Johnson wrote:
God I am getting old, who remembers spending hours getting programs to run in extended memory?
I do. I was working for Quadram Corporation in Atlanta back then. I wrote Quadram's EMM (Extended Memory Management) "driver" for the PS/2 (remember those?) as well as the rest of the Quadmaster V suite for the QuadEMS+ I/O memory board. The suite included the memory management drivers (LIM, EMS, etc), print spoolers, RAM disks and the like. That was a fun job. I learned to write bootstrap loaders in assembly and then figured out how to get the boostrap to call the rest of the loaders which I wrote in Microsoft C. Loved it! My first "real" computer was my original 5150 with PC-DOS 1.1. I wrote a text editor in BASICA (which I eventually moved to the compiled BASIC). I still have that editor in an XP VM on here, it still runs! Won't run in the DOS Box for Win7, though. Oh well. Wish I still had the source code, I could probably fix that! :-) Heh ... I still have the 8088 chip I pulled out of that 5150. Replaced it with a NEC V-20 before my brother-in-law got the machine. He used that thing (with DOS 2.1 I think) for 3 or 4 more years after I was through with it! -Max :D
modified on Friday, July 29, 2011 11:31 AM
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Got to say that the IBM was excellent. And very sturdy, especially the keyboard. We did the upgrade from twin floppies to a 20Mb hard drive. Wow! 20 whole megs! I was in Silicon Heaven. :)
------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] Trolls[^]
Dalek Dave wrote:
Got to say that the IBM was excellent.
And very sturdy, especially the keyboard.Yeah. I used my IBM AT keyboard on several systems after my original AT died. Best dadgum keyboard I ever owned. You could drive a tank over it without scratching it. The nice "click" of those keys really felt like you were entering something into the machine. Not like these "mushy" keyboards now! -Max :D
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[old_man_rant]oh, those youngsters don't know nothing... these were the old times, were we... god dammit... I forgot, what we've done...[/old_man_rant] :rolleyes:
(yes|no|maybe)*
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DOS 3.31 was my first experience. I would whizz around the disk quite merrily, using the short cuts, writing batch files, using the echo command to annoy my colleagues who knew nothing about computers.
------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] Trolls[^]
my first was CP/M (on a Z80 comp), then I turn to DOS 2.0... :-D when I started using DOS 6.22 I bought the book "Building DOS device drivers in C"... a lot of time spend on hacking... ja
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Dalek Dave wrote:
Got to say that the IBM was excellent.
And very sturdy, especially the keyboard.Yeah. I used my IBM AT keyboard on several systems after my original AT died. Best dadgum keyboard I ever owned. You could drive a tank over it without scratching it. The nice "click" of those keys really felt like you were entering something into the machine. Not like these "mushy" keyboards now! -Max :D
I remember getting my first IBM AT in 1984. We all couldn't wait to get one. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a let down when I got one. When I dropped my hand on the table the computer was on, I would lose half the directory. Bad disk controller.
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my first was CP/M (on a Z80 comp), then I turn to DOS 2.0... :-D when I started using DOS 6.22 I bought the book "Building DOS device drivers in C"... a lot of time spend on hacking... ja
Hernan Monserrat wrote:
my first was CP/M (on a Z80 comp), then I turn to DOS 2.0... :-D
when I started using DOS 6.22 I bought the book "Building DOS device drivers in C"... a lot of time spend on hacking... jaWe were writing device drivers before there were books on the subject. All we had was loose documentation and notes from MS and IBM and a lot of trial-and-error. -Max :D
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Mine was a 1640[^] - but I added an 32MB HDD card. I thought it was brilliant! We once started a Mandelbrot diagram zoom in and went off down the pub to let it finish...
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together. Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."
Wow, MS Dos 2.3, 3.0, 3.1, .... one booting system on one 2.5" Disk, oh of course with some small text enhancer for needle printers and an editor included ! I started with a heavy weight 8088 processor machine with 640 kbyte (!!) of memory, monster 5 kg double slot 10 MB HDD. NO graphic card, monochrom bernstein 13" display, a graphic simulation program let me play for a 2D helicopter game ..... Oh boy what a challenge to get this started to run. By the way my first DOS MP3 compressor, needed 3 hours for a 4 min song !! Uuuh was that a rush Today we are yawning for a machine booting above 2 min., we could go for lunch at that time, afterwards, "let's rock the keyboards" greets Mike
