I was asked around May 2000 in an email interview about my
website "Interesting DOS programs" at http://www.opus.co.tt/dave
Here's a question that was asked and my response :
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3) A more obvious question for many: WHY?
Most have abandoned DOS long ago and had moved on to Windows,
so why stick with this seeming legacy?
And why not use the more popular Linux instead,
if one dislikes Windows?
For me, I like the command line interface of doing things.
You enter commands at the prompt and the computer runs it.
Using DOS is second nature for me and simple to understand and use.
The boot up time for my machine when I turn it on is around 15 seconds
with DOS and I can launch Arachne and start dialing in 2 seconds.
If I want to do anything while I'm on the net (say play an audio CD)
I can shell to DOS, run the audio CD program and type
EXIT to return to Arachne in 4 seconds.
There are only two configuration files (CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT) to
worry about (rather than an complex registry in Win9x).
It's dependable. Even if a DOS app locks up the machine requiring
a reboot, there is less worry of anything happening to the OS or to
other apps. Uninstalling apps are simple as well.
Since DOS apps are self-contained (there is no shared DLLs or the like or
options stored in a registry), it can be easily transported to a
new machine or hard drive by simply XCOPY's the directory to the new drive
(or use a Laplink-type utility between the two machines)
and if necessary, re-run the setup utility included with the app.
The "limitations" of DOS results in small programs which I find more
interesting than large programs which does the same things on other OSes
I think it is unfortunate that many people equate the size of a program
with the quality of a program. So if a program comes on 2 CDROMS, it must
be better than an similar application that could fit on a 1.44MB floppy
(which could run on a OS that could also fit on a floppy :-))
Bigger doesn't mean better.
For example the GPAGE utility (which I use to generate my DOS programs
site) is 4K! There is an image viewer called
Lxpic (http://home.t-online.de/home/stefan.peichl/)
which can view JPG, GIF, BMP, PCX, CAM and others files.
The EXE is only 15K!
Also, many if not all of these apps can run in a DOS box under Win9x.
Many support long file names so Windows users can still use them.
(One example : the GPAGE utility can also convert MS Favourites to a
single HTM file)
While Linux is great (I have it installed as a secondary OS on my machine),
it is more complex than DOS (although DOS experience is a plus
when using the Bash shell) and there is less useful documentation
for Linux than there is for DOS since Linux is a relatively new OS.
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Dev Teelucksingh
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Interesting DOS programs at http://www.opus.co.tt/dave
Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society at http://www.ttcsweb.org
-- This mail was written by user of Arachne, WWW browser for DOS --
-- the Ultimate Internet Client --
