The end of MS DOS.

[ajetrumpet]

How long will this continue to haunt Microsoft? I personally would love to work entirely in DOS, but the masses do not accept this, and they never will either. Unfortunately for MS, those nifty little windows can't run without it. In my opinion, structures like DOS and UNIX are for real programmers. That's closer to where it all began, and still takes some real thinking to get something done!

I hope I never lose the opportunity to work within these structures, but I'm sure they'll disappear at some point in the future, we just don't know when...

 

[Rabbie]

How long will this continue to haunt Microsoft? I personally would love to work entirely in DOS, but the masses do not accept this, and they never will either. Unfortunately for MS, those nifty little windows can't run without it. In my opinion, structures like DOS and UNIX are for real programmers. That's closer to where it all began, and still takes some real thinking to get something done!

I hope I never lose the opportunity to work within these structures, but I'm sure they'll disappear at some point in the future, we just don't know when...

It's called progress. When I started programming more than 40 years ago it was all in machine code. the computer only had 8K of memory and was dead slow so every routine had to be carefully optimised.

Now we can have nice graphic interfaces and I for one find it easier to just click on a delete icon than type in a command. But each to their own so lets hope you will still be able to use DOS for some time to come

 

[georgedwilkinson]

I just bought a new Vista machine with a mega-uber-ultra video graphics adapter. I can play WoW and any other video game with all the graphics settings turned all the way up and listen to all the action with surround sound.

But I sure do miss the old, old games that were text based or had crummy text graphics because nobody knew how to create pixelated graphics games. I even miss the old 2D scrollers.

And somehow, it seemed easier to write C programs for business use and get good results than most of the graphics based IDEs out there now (Access excepted).

I'm with Adam, the text line stuff is just more fun and "mysterious".

 

[Fifty2One]

I just bought a new Vista machine with a mega-uber-ultra video graphics adapter. I can play WoW and any other video game with all the graphics settings turned all the way up and listen to all the action with surround sound.

But I sure do miss the old, old games that were text based or had crummy text graphics because nobody knew how to create pixelated graphics games. I even miss the old 2D scrollers.

And somehow, it seemed easier to write C programs for business use and get good results than most of the graphics based IDEs out there now (Access excepted).

I'm with Adam, the text line stuff is just more fun and "mysterious".

LOL if you want a gaming challenge take a copy of a game that is over five years old and try to play it on a newer machine, most are close to unplayable because of the increase in cpu speed.

Just thinking back to the days sitting in the basement of school and playing BOMARC over the secure phone lines with other BASIC programmers. I remember we had posters of the AppleII and a Epson dot matrix printer in the room... we had dreams of personal computers and the ultra modern 5.25 floppy discs...

 

[dan-cat]

Man has always used tools to make things simpler.

It doesn't mean you can't do it the hard way if you want to.

I would liken it to driving. If you've only ever driven an automatic then you're never going to be quite as good a driver as if you've started out with a manual transmission. But it still gets you from point A to point B.

 

[ajetrumpet]

I would liken it to driving. If you've only ever driven an automatic then you're never going to be quite as good a driver as if you've started out with a manual transmission.

I've always driven a manual transmission. I never had an automatic, but I've driven them.

I have one of the top rated cars in this country: Toyota Yaris.

If I remember correctly, it was just rated as one of the best cars for the money.

 

[Banana]

I personally doubt that shell will go away. There's so much you can do with it that it won't make sense to do away with it.

Heck, Mac OS X has a built-in bash shell, so they're not quite throwing it away.

MS DOS, OTOH, needs to go. It's useless to me; no vim, runas suck giant purple donkey balls, no grep, no built-in ssh, and not quite as many configuration files that I can edit as quickly and easy. I've since used Cygwin in place of MS DOS.

 

[Fifty2One]

Man has always used tools to make things simpler.

It doesn't mean you can't do it the hard way if you want to.

I would liken it to driving. If you've only ever driven an automatic then you're never going to be quite as good a driver as if you've started out with a manual transmission. But it still gets you from point A to point B.

Nothing is sadder than downshifting from "4th to 3rd" on an exit ramp when going at a good speed, only to realise that you have just shifted from D to P. Switching to automatic only added to the mobility fiasco as I found that I would habitually keep reaching for the shifter.
I have always been a braille type of driver anyway and people around here are used to not parking near any vehicle owned by me. Since I returned to a stick I have also noticed that there is no longer a red puddle of unknow fluid under my car where I park. Perhaps it really is my puddle and not from someone else that may have parked there before me

 

[KenHigg]

I think business requirements keep dos, etc going. Still a ton of big business running legacy stuff on those platforms... Heck, there's still a ton of stuff running through the old teletype backbone -

 

[georgedwilkinson]

In fact, I'm still writing systems which rely heavily on DOS shell programming for routine tasks like ftp, encrypting, decrypting, etc.

 

[ajetrumpet]

I think business requirements keep dos, etc going. Still a ton of big business running legacy stuff on those platforms

I worked for a very large firm in Iowa that was running its low-level database operations on IBM AS400.

 

[Banana]

In fact, I'm still writing systems which rely heavily on DOS shell programming for routine tasks like ftp, encrypting, decrypting, etc.

Any particular reason for not moving forward? Surely there's plently of tools that can be managed by shell that can do the job much faster, and we don't even have to have a *nix environment, no?