can an os be wrritten in 6 months time

[Dex4u]

I think some people miss the point of "a Dos like OS", just because you modernise it, does not mean you take away its advantages.

That is to have full access to all hardware and giving the programmer some credit, for not being so incompetent as to crash the whole PC, ( leaving that to other OS makers ;D ).

Such a OS may not be good as a desktop OS, but theres still a place for such a OS, for things like the xbox, ps2 etc.

[NotTheCHEAT]

Yes, a "modern DOS" (if there were such a thing) would be Windows- except I'm pretending Windows never existed. I'm pretending DOS stayed a commandline and evolved into a modern OS. And that would be something like linux (though IMHO not nearly the same).

But yes, the "modern DOS" is Windows. Problem is, Windows is NOT a modern DOS. Windows is a WIMPy environment, DOS a commandline. Yes, Windows evolved from DOS, but no, Windows is NOT a modern DOS.

[Pype.Clicker]

Oh wait! There already is a modern DOS! It's called....Windows!

no way, really. Look at the internals of WindowsNT, it has virtually nothing to do with MS-DOS ...
Look at the externals, and it has nothing to do with it either. The command line is still there. okay. i bet you remove it and everything else still works (unless batch files, maybe). You don't quite have much more of DOS on windows 2000 / windows XP than on a Linux machine having Dosemu installed, imvho.

The modern DOS is most likely to be called "freedos-32" ...

[AR]

Windows is the product of the company that produced DOS, therefore by association, and the fact DOS was discontinued in favour of it, Windows is the evolution of DOS into the "modern times". The internals may be different, it may not be CLI but it still the product that was originally based on and suceeded DOS.

Arguing over what constitutes a "modern DOS" is pointless really, anything and everything can be classified as a "modern DOS" depending on your criteria (eg. real mode and/or CLI and/or all kernel priviledge and/or minimalist and/or lack of multiple user support and/or lack of any detectable security mechanisms and so on and so forth).

[Candy]

Oh wait! There already is a modern DOS! It's called....Windows!

no way, really. Look at the internals of WindowsNT, it has virtually nothing to do with MS-DOS ...
Look at the externals, and it has nothing to do with it either. The command line is still there. okay. i bet you remove it and everything else still works (unless batch files, maybe). You don't quite have much more of DOS on windows 2000 / windows XP than on a Linux machine having Dosemu installed, imvho.

Less actually. Dosemu can emulate the speed and lowlevel parts of DOS (and the machine) better than the 2k/XP dosbox, so for playing lots of old DOS games you need dosemu on windows too.

[Pype.Clicker]

Windows is the product of the company that produced DOS, therefore by association, and the fact DOS was discontinued in favour of it, Windows is the evolution of DOS into the "modern times".

Agree that Windows 9x is the continuation of DOS, but technically, Windows NT is a fresh start (and business-speaking too).

Arguing over what constitutes a "modern DOS" is pointless really, anything and everything can be classified as a "modern DOS" depending on your criteria (eg. real mode and/or CLI and/or all kernel priviledge and/or minimalist and/or lack of multiple user support and/or lack of any detectable security mechanisms and so on and so forth).

Seems one of the wisest post in this thread for a while. We failed to define "what could be a state-of-the-art-yet-as-lean-as-dos-was" system since we obviously don't agree either on the pro/cons of DOS, nor on what its "spirit" was ...

[Phugoid]

Code: Select all

Agree that Windows 9x is the continuation of DOS, but technically, Windows NT is a fresh start (and business-speaking too).

Exactly. Win95/98[me=]was a "continuation" of DOS, just long enough for NT-compatible software to be developed for their NT-compatible API.[/me]

WinNT is another family entirely, and being called Windows does not imply any fundamental similarity to Win9x. That's marketing.

[Cjmovie]

Yes, I know. I WAS talking about Win 1.0 -98se (ME?)

Of course Windows 1.0 etc. were really just PROGRAMS that ran in a DOS extender........

[GLneo]

windows[1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, me?] isn't an extention, i thought it was just a pmode program that ran on DOS, like you could start dos then type[run] win and start windows,

p.s. can't FreeDOS run win.exe ???

[AR]

A DOS Extender is a program that allowed DOS programs to access above the 1MB mark for storage.

[Kemp]

I don't know about pre-3.1 versions of windows, but 3.1 to 98 (and I think ME, but the info I've seen on it is a bit vague and it seemed to be a bit of a 9x/NT crossover) were just a graphical shell for DOS that enabled pmode programs and suchlike to run (did 3.1 enable pmode? I don't remember off-hand), they could just do whatever they wanted to the system due to DOS being a real-mode OS with no protection so setting up pmode and stuff wasn't a problem (though they arguably became MUCH more useful than that towards the end of the line), see win3.1's menu system with the option to close it which returned back to DOS. NT/2K/XP are a completely different OS that happen to give you a command line option that emulates DOS.

[Pype.Clicker]

I don't know about pre-3.1 versions of windows, but 3.1 to 98 were just a graphical shell for DOS

I got the belief it grew more than that. Since 3.1, they were running in protected mode (even using 16-bits protected mode on the 286, yessir), and it was at least both a graphical shell *and* a completely new programming environment offering e.g. virtual memory, program interoperation and things alike. It had its own drivers for -e.g.- modems, printers, etc. Windows 95 and followers even have their own disk drivers and FS implementation (and imho, win 3.11 probably had the same though only guys at redmon could tell).

It featured lot of craps, flaws, and other things i dislike. okay. It was horribly mixing new stuff and DOS-inherited hierarchy so that people that relied on old DOS-stuff for business do not simply opt for OS/2 instead. okay. but yet, i couldn't deny it in the listing of "operating systems" category.

see win3.1's menu system with the option to close it which returned back to DOS.

see above about business continuity.

[JoeKayzA]

I don't know about pre-3.1 versions of windows, but 3.1 to 98 (and I think ME, but the info I've seen on it is a bit vague and it seemed to be a bit of a 9x/NT crossover) were just a graphical shell for DOS that enabled pmode programs and suchlike to run (did 3.1 enable pmode? I don't remember off-hand), they could just do whatever they wanted to the system due to DOS being a real-mode OS with no protection so setting up pmode and stuff wasn't a problem (though they arguably became MUCH more useful than that towards the end of the line), see win3.1's menu system with the option to close it which returned back to DOS. NT/2K/XP are a completely different OS that happen to give you a command line option that emulates DOS.

I wouldn't say that the programs that win95/98 starts can do _everything_ because MS-DOS is a realmode OS. AFAIK, every program got its own address space. This was more due to the memory layout that windows used in these systems, where the 'user' program had full access to the shared and the system memory, which was mapped into every address space. But no one says that you can't build a secure system with unix-style processes that you start off DOS.

I think in windows 3.x/95/98/me, MS-DOS is not the basis, it's rather the boot loader. As Pype mentioned, these systems bring along their own drivers and enable and handle protected mode on their own. 16bit DOS drivers are, IIRC, only used as a fallback method when no suitable native driver is available, right? So they are more than just a graphical shell.

cheers Joe

[Kemp]

Actually, JoeKayzA, you seem to have hit what I was thinking on the head there, the win9x series use DOS effectively as a bootloader.

I wouldn't say that the programs that win95/98 starts can do _everything_ because MS-DOS is a realmode OS

You appear to have misunderstood what I meant there, I was referring to the actual OS being able to do anything, not the applications running under it.

Pype, yeah, I see what you mean there. I guess I was being slightly harsh on them, but that's how I saw the win3.1/9x series from the beginning (many years ago, and before I knew as much about PCs and OSs in general as I do now), I could imagine it calling the DOS copy command behind the scenes when you dragged a file somewhere (even though I knew that probably wasn't actually the case), that image just kinda stuck with me.

[NotTheCHEAT]

Windows 9x and earlier SUCK. They aren't even real operating systems!

Windows 1.0 was a lot like the DOS SHELL, in fact I suspect that it is DOS shell except in graphics mode, and with a GUI instead of a TUI, and some system calls to support the GUI.

anything and everything can be classified as a "modern DOS" depending on your criteria (eg. real mode and/or CLI and/or all kernel priviledge and/or minimalist and/or lack of multiple user support and/or lack of any detectable security mechanisms and so on and so forth).

True, but I think most of use were speaking in terms of a minimalist single-user CLI OS. Which is what DOS is, and also what linux is (although it's becoming more and more bloated, and it's no longer single-user though it used to be). You have to admit that it is fairly minimalist: it has very few programs but any distro worth the CD drive it requires in order to install (and CD-ROM drives are dirt cheap), it has enough programs to more than compensate. It is a modern DOS-like OS (speaking in terms of interface). It's internals are far superior to DOS (which AFAIK was actually based on QDOS, and anything that has the word 'Dirty' in it is bound to suck).