History of MS-DOS 1981-1995

Comments · 140

• KH

  @khacker7345 · 3 years ago

  Factoid: When MS-DOS 6.22 came out, there was no more "DOS-SHELL". When I saw this, I approached my instructor and said, "Hey Paul, y'know what? It looks to me like their trying to force everyone into using Windows....". His response? A bigass grin!

  25

• SP

  @spearPYN · 4 years ago (edited)

  MS-DOS 5.0 was a game changer in 91! I love command line operating systems.

  19

• CF

  @cfbmoo1 · 5 years ago

  I really miss DOS. The more Windows turns in to a SaaS system the more I seem to miss DOS and it's simplicity. Linux is nice and all but I just miss DOS and the old Turbo C/Pascal stuff along with other things.

  44

• LI

  @LinoMastrodomenico · 6 years ago

  Fun fact: to this day FreeDOS still maintains some surprising compatibility with its distant roots in CP/M.<br><br>E.g. in the 70&apos;s you could write an &quot;hello world&quot; COM program for CP/M running on a Z80 CPU by loading the offset of the string to print in register DE, then loading 9 in register C, calling the OS with &quot;call 5&quot; and finally exit the program with &quot;ret&quot;.<br><br>50 years later in FreeDOS you can write a similar COM program by loading the offset of the string in register DX (as opposed to DE, because the CPU is different), loading 9 in CL, calling DOS with &quot;call 5&quot; and exit the program with &quot;ret&quot;, just like in CP/M.<br><br>In both OSes the string must be terminated with a &quot;$&quot; character.<br><br>It&apos;s not the <i>recommended</i> way to do it in FreeDOS but it&apos;s still supported. 😁

  46

• KH

  @khacker7345 · 3 years ago

  My computer career started 30 years ago, in 93, when I took a vocational course in &quot;Electronics and CPU Repair.&quot; (that&apos;s what it was called). I had &quot;zero&quot; computer knowledge when I started. All Pomona school district computers, came to our class for the instructor to repair. I would go up and ask him, &apos;whacha doin&apos; Paul?&apos;... he&apos;d explain about whatever the current thing he was working on... at some point, I said &quot;is that something I could do?&quot;... and he said &apos;sure, here&apos;s what you do...&quot; . And whoosh! I was on my way! after 3 months, a friend I met who was a former student that visited Paul, gave me a 286AT Kaypro 12mHz motherboard with &nbsp;no math co-processor. I took the motherboard to class next day, and said to Paul: &quot;Hey Paul, look what I got!&quot;... uhm,, what do I do next with it?&quot; Paul pulled out a pen and a notepad, and we noted each item, I would need to complete the computer. He sent me to a mom and pop PC shop... where I got all the parts, I paid $5 for a brand new horizontal case with a power supply. So, after day three, and a dozen MFM drives later, I had a working computer! I was happy, and then several students approached me, from like, outta nowhere... and they were all like, &apos;man, you built that in 3 days...&apos;. And I was like, &apos;hey, yeah, guess I did&apos;. I was a single father with 4yo twins boy and girl. By the time they were 5 (in 1994) They had a 286AT, with a CGI (16 color) monitor. I created simple batch files, and the kid&apos;s would type &quot;1&quot; and &quot;Mickey Mouse 123&quot; would load. From there it was one great adventure after another, as PC boards got better, CPU&apos;s got faster. I had a few computer jobs, then went into business for myself for about 5 years, when I was forced to move and lost all my clientel. AT 50yo, a highschool and jr college dropout, I started attending college. Lasted 5 1/2 years before my health forced me to drop from college. I was 3 classes from graduation.<br>But I took every single electronics class they offered just about, some twice because after 3 years, things changed, so there was new stuff to be learned. It was networking, electronics where you create projects and test them, then there were the Computer electronics classes, same location, just PC related. I&apos;m grateful I was able to do go all those years, liked the Windows 10 Power Users class a lot. Nowadays, I just hangout with my big service dog and try to do this and that to keep busy.

  3

• DA

  @DanielMonteiroNit · 5 years ago

  *DOS is much more powerful than people give credit for. There is a proper API underneath the very small layer of code

  11

• RJ

  @rjmacreadyoutpost3121 · 4 years ago

  I still have an unopened copy of MS DOS 6.6 - waited long enough to not actually own anything that will read a disk. It’s gathering dust on my office shelf with a few other (relative) antiques. Sure miss the simplicity and raw speed of the DOS family. <br><br>Still have a copy of Paradox somewhere too. A very under-appreciated database with its own language (PAL, later ObjectPAL).<br><br>Thanks for the look back. Enjoy your videos.

  9

• WH

  @whatzause · 1 year ago

  PIP in CP/M stood for “Peripheral Interchange Program“. I still have a working Heath H89 model microcomputer that runs CP/M using floppy discs. I have written quite a few software applications under CP/M in the 1980s, and we had the ability in those days even to patch the OS. The entire Heath H89 operates on only 64K ram. The CPU is a 2MHz Z80. But I can load and run, on that machine, a Fortran compiler, an MBasic compiler, a very good word processor. These utilities ran fast, because the code had to be concise. There was room for large documents, because they could be read and swapped in on the fly, from floppies.

  1

• FI

  @firebladex8586 · 5 years ago

  Here&apos;s to 40yrs 🍻🥂

  3

• AS

  @asmabenoun9484 · 3 years ago

  i feel old already, i enjoyed working and studying DOS in 1997,, was awesome time

  4

• WA

  @waynejohn8 · 2 years ago

  Thank you. Brought back many memories of my DOS days from the 80&apos;s and 90&apos;s. Fantastic. The good old days.

  2

• KH

  @khacker7345 · 3 years ago

  I actually got to see, a computer with MS-DOS 3.0 installed.<br>There were 17 files.

  2