A Brief Mental Pause
By Editor (05/30/08)
Yesterday and today, I took a short vacation from the mess in the Republic.
I fired up the 486 box running DR-DOS 7.02 and tried to see how much I could remember.
Played around some in Turbo Pascal 6 and Borland C 5.01. Recompiled a couple of programs and patched Turbo Pascal 6 so it will compile programs to run on the new fast computers.
Wanting to add some compiles and tools I realized I needed a CD-ROM on the box to be able load the various new programs, finally managed to find the appropriate drivers to get the thing to respond.
This baby runs with 32meg of memory and an Intel 486-DX 66 CPU. Actually my AMD 386-40 with 32meg of RAM box consistently runs faster.
I'm looking to get new versions of Watcom C/C++, DigitalMars C/C++ and DigitalMars D installed. Delphi 2 and Symantic C++ 7.5 to be installed.
I have TASM 5 installed with Optasm 1.72 and MASM 6.14 coming soon.
DOS may be simple by today's standards but it is faaaaast! It is also far more productive than most any GUI driven OS.
I do Win95/98, NT4, W2K, XP and Vista(forced) as well as Fedora 8, OS 9.2.2 and OSX 10.4. Frankly Fedora 8, NT4 and OS 9.2.2 win the war in each particular venue.
Fedora is making the most valid progress and I suspect will soon eclipse the Vista fiasco and the sloppy OSX OS effort.
Fedora (Linux) is fast, mean, uses little memory, very user friendly and gains in features on a daily basis.
DOS emulating UNIX as implemented by Microsoft was actually and accidentally a pretty good OS. The DR-DOS gang moved DOS toward being much more productive, but was eventually quashed by MS .
DR-DOS and Novell-DOS were exciting efforts and both are excellent OS's to run on a second box. There are a zillion of cheap to free programs for DOS hanging around on the Internet.
A little serious searching will enable you to find DR-DOS 7 for free on the Internet. A search for Open DR-DOS may help.
You can find some good free utilities and good links at http://pysmatic.com/
Oh well, I guess my little vacation is over...
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