On 9/18/2019 8:45 AM, Thalis Agáthōn wrote: > > yes ofcourse, on server site its the software which is decisive, but > on the client side mainly the hardware en a little bit the software. > > Uptil now I think FreeDOS is the best choice for 25 yo pc's. > > 00:46, 19 September 2019, Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com>:
You are making one basic but important mistake in your endeavor. You are > trying to run technology that has developed well after the heydays of > DOS, and those technology developed because of improved hardware. Just > trying to shoehorn things that have been designed for different > requirements just doesn't work. > > 25 years ago, IP networking was in its infancy, non-routing IPX was the > king on the hill, having already beaten out ArcNet and TokenRing. Things > like VoIP (including Skype) have developed because at some point there > was a switch in technology from IPX to IP networking, and with that a > lot of newfangled things became available and popular for the general > masses. "Social Media" just didn't exist back then, either these things > have all came to life after the Internet began to spread. And the > Internet in general was much simpler back then than it is today, so it > was possible to have some services of the Internet available on DOS. > > But for even something as rudimentary as graphics, applications had to > provide their own driver support. Same for printing. Drivers have never > really been a part of DOS itself, it has always been a matter of the > applications, with some basic exceptions of storage (SCSI, CD ROM) and > mouse, which provided some translation layer between the hardware and > existing DOS/BIOS functions. If you needed something that those basic > DOS/BIOS function didn't provide, you have to make your own proprietary > extensions. And none of those were compatible. There were some attempts > to level those incompatibilities a bit, via ASPI and VESA for example, > but at that time, DOS was already a dead horse, so there wasn't much > support for those technologies from the hardware manufacturer at that > time anymore, because Windows and a totally different system when it > came to support hardware had become mainstream by now. > > Yes, you can breath some new life in 25 year old hardware (if the power > supplies allow) by using (Free)DOS, but you just can't reasonably expect > that every modern day technology can be utilized through it... > > On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 6:03 PM Thalis Agáthōn <asa...@yandex.com> wrote: > Thank you for your input. > > For one I am a beginner, but they did have Bilboard groups right? And was > voice over network such a big issue to develop for DOS os? > > In any case I think they could have build these things within DOS, if they > had sustainability in mind. But rather they had money in mind. Capitalism > forces companies to continuesly innovate and create new things even though > certain things may be sufficient. > > This world is heading in a very wrong way because of this mentality. Ppl > are cought up in this technical rat race and I don't want to follow suit. > DOS is a fine system. It's sober and humble. If the mindset would change > we could cherish what we have and try to do that as good as we can. I am > quite certain that the essence of the tools we use today can be done in > DOS. Less flashy and a bit slower maybe, but nevetheless, functional. Then > again, I am a beginner 😊 and maybe naive. > Yes, DOS was a very powerful system for the 16-bit era. There's no mistake about that. And FreeDOS provides a very capable and compatible DOS operating system. Most applications for MS-DOS should run on FreeDOS. The exceptions are "corner cases" like Microsoft Windows that have their own reasons to only run on MS-DOS (see AARD). But Ralf is correct to point out that a lot of technology has been developed since DOS ruled the ladns. Sure, some of that technology can be recreated in the 16-bit DOS model, even with all of DOS's limitations. But some of those newer technologies are just too difficult (or impossible) to reproduce on FreeDOS - due to the architectures involved. In an earlier email, you mentioned some things you like to do on FreeDOS. And yes, you can do a lot of that in FreeDOS: **office* I'm glad you mentioned this! DOS dominated office environments, so there are a lot of great office applications for DOS. There's a real push right now for "distraction-free office environments" that let you put all your attention to writing, or working on a spreadsheet, or whatever. And DOS does that *very* well. My favorite DOS spreadsheet is AsEasyAs, and I still believe that AsEasyAs can do (almost) everything I use LibreOffice Spreadsheets for. If I had to, I could probably do all my spreadsheet work in AsEasyAs. And I can take my AsEasyAs spreadsheet file and import it into LibreOffice Spreadsheet and continue working on it there. And for example, George R.R. Martin still uses a DOS computer and WordStar 4.0 to write his Game of Thrones books. George finds this is a great way to write! If I wanted a distraction-free word processor, I'd probably use WordPerfect - but that's just my preference because I used WP for so long. **browsing* This is much harder to do on DOS. If you just want a plain HTML experience, DOS web browsers like Dillo can do the job. Depending on your needs, Links might work too. But many websites rely on Javascript for their functionality, and DOS web browsers aren't up to that task. **gaming* There are a *lot* of great DOS games. I still play DOOM 2 and TIE Fighter on my DOS system. Good games! I often comment that **social networking* See "browsing" But it should be theoretically possible to write a dedicated 3rd-party DOS web client to interact just with Twitter or Facebook. And maybe Instagram. But I wouldn't want to try it. The challenge in writing any dedicated DOS web client is the API on the other end. Organizations like Facebook and Twitter hold those pretty tightly. You'd have the same problem writing a 3rd-party Facebook client for Linux, for example. Which is why any 3rd-party social networking apps you see on other platforms either (a) have a relationship with the social media company, or (b) require constant upkeep to stay compatible with the social media's API. **voip* I don't know of any VOIP clients for DOS. I don't know a lot about AV, so I'm not a good person to comment on this. **email* You can use dedicated email clients and communicate with your email provider over POP or IMAP. I know that encryption has moved on, so maybe the SSL support in older DOS email clients would need to be updated. I haven't tried. **media* Probably depends on what you mean by "media." If you mean music, listening to MP3s and music CDs are certainly things you can do on FreeDOS. But if you want to watch a DVD on FreeDOS, I don't know that the codecs have been developed for FreeDOS. Probably due to the 32-bit nature - but AV isn't my area of specialty so I don't really know. Yes, you can do many everyday things in FreeDOS. I like to jump back to FreeDOS for a few things that I happen to enjoy doing. But for most modern workloads, it's kind of hard to use DOS exclusively. Take networking, for example. DOS wasn't built for modularity. DOS doesn't have a network stack that's maintained at the kernel level or similar that other applications can just use. Linux and Windows do that, because they are designed that way. But not DOS. Sure, you could create a new DOS kernel that did that for you - but none of the many DOS applications that used networks would use it. On DOS, applications include their own TCP/IP stack. That's due to the how DOS was designed and developed - it was created in the 1980s when networking wasn't really a thing. I am a huge FreeDOS nerd and even I don't use FreeDOS every day. At my day job (IT Mentor Group <https://itmentorgroup.biz/>) I use Linux and Linux applications <https://opensource.com/article/19/9/business-creators-open-source-tools> to do my work, and I run FreeDOS in a PC emulator. I use Fedora <https://getfedora.org/> for my Linux distro, and QEMU for my PC emulator. (That's just my personal preference - you can also use Ubuntu or some other Linux distro, or some other emulator like VirtualBox.) Jim
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