On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 5:02 PM, Alex <alxm...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 10:54 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> *That* purpose has been unnecessary for decades. Running in a VM or >> emulator still lets you *run* DOS and legacy DOS apps, which is all >> you are likely to really *need* to do. > > I beg to disagree. For me, at least, DOS is about the OS, not about > the applications. Those matter too, but the system is my main > interest, for the reasons that I outlined above. The OS sits between you and your programs and the hardware. The whole *purpose* of the system is to *run* apps. What can you do with a DOS system that *has* no apps, and has only DOS itself and the standard utilities provided with it? (And before you say "write programs", the programming language you use and the tools you will write your code in if the language itself does not provide them are apps. You don't have those. What do you actually *do*?) If you use Unix, there *are* useful things you can do with it without having any apps loaded, because Unix provides an assortment of things as part of the standard distribution that are third-party add-ons in DOS. If you use DOS, your options are *far* more limited. Yes, in MS-DOS, you could use GWBASIC. Personally, I'd prefer a root canal. > If you don't mind my asking, what is your interest in DOS then? Just > for running old apps? Pretty much. Like I said, I began using DOS in the 2.X days when the original IBM-PC was setting a standard, and a variety of compatible and not-quite compatible machines were lining up to compete. It's fun to dust off old skills and use some older apps, but it's strictly a hobby. There is no way I could make money on it, and for serious *work*, I use Windows or *nix. For most folks running DOS, the likely reason is to run legacy DOS *games*, which is why DOSBox and DOSEmu exist. There is simply no way I *could* do the majority of what I normally do under DOS. The ability simply doesn't exist. See the thread elsewhere on problems getting on line in FreeDOS. I successfully did so back when I first set FreeDOS up in a partition on the test machine where it lives, but did *not* seriously try to use it. There was no need: if I wanted to go online I had Windows and Linux with modern browsers and other tools. The ability to run DOS at all may eventually go away due to changes in technology. The only real answer to that will probably be "Tough. Deal with it." DOS is a fun toy to play with, but I have other toys if it breaks. ______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Better than sec? Nothing is better than sec when it comes to monitoring Big Data applications. Try Boundary one-second resolution app monitoring today. Free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
