>many people in my region are convinced that DOS definitely
>ended on 31 December 1999...
DR-DOS on my computer successfully made the transition from 1999 to 2000, but
then the computer boots into year 1994 or 2094. BIOS has the last word? IBM
has a PC-DOS 2000.
>Now, seriously: does it make any sense to re-introduce DOS to
>(probably younger) people who have grown up only with WINDOWS?
Windows is not as user-friendly as it's cracked up to be. When my computer was
down with power supply gone bad, I couldn't figure how to make a directory on a
floppy disk on the public library computers with Windows NT Workstation 4. I
finally semi-succeeded but had to correct it after I got the home computer
working again. Windows GUI has nothing as user-friendly as MD A:\TELEBOT, and
Linux command prompt is almost as user-friendly. One man at the library said
the iMac he had at home was much more user-friendly than the library computers
with Windows. OS/2 Warp 4 is also much more user-friendly than what I've seen
of Windows. I find DOS command prompt much easier to work with than Windows
GUI, but Linux and the BSDs have much more future without the memory and file
system limitations of DOS, and much better choice of Internet applications.
Regarding the self-extracting archive and Arachne installation wizards, there
should also be something for people who are not coming from Windows. My first
experience with DOSPPPD was in a package (ZIP file) that included Lynx386 but no
Arachne. I got that running on the first try, much better than I can say about
Arachne, where I couldn't get the dialer to work from within Arachne.
Christof, it looks like you may have quoted much more than you intended to, like
758 lines (the whole digest?).
