On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 7:07 PM, Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 12/16/2014 4:01 PM, dmccunney wrote: > >>> DOS is not dead but people need to treat DOS as DOS, not as a second >>> coming of Linux... >> >> The fundamental issue for DOS is exactly what you *do* with it, and >> *why* you might use DOS in preference to something else like Linux. >> The fact that something *can* run DOS doesn't necessarily mean it >> *should*. > > Works the other way around as well. Just because you can get basic web > browsing features or other uses of the Internet on (Free)DOS, doesn't > mean you should either...
Precisely. I don't even try. In my case, the question of "Why use DOS?" is mostly "for fun, and to run a few ancient DOS apps I still use." The machine that runs FreeDOS is largely a testbed to see what performance I can wring out of limited hardware. It more-or-less runs Win2K (but *not* XP) and a couple of flavors of Linux, and FreeDOS. Win2K and Linux plod along. FreeDOS flies on it. But I *don't* try to surf the web from it, in any OS. It's simply too slow, even with a CAT5 connection to a port on my router. I also don't attempt to watch YouTube. Audio is okay, but video is a series of still pictures. The machine simply isn't powerful enough to do such things acceptably. My desktop is a refurb Dell unit, with a quad-core Xeon CPU at 2.4ghz, 8GB RAM, and boots from a 240GB SSD, with an ATI video card with a gig of video RAM. It multi-boots Win 7 Pro and Ubuntu 14.04, nad has a CAT5 connection to my router, which connects to a 100mbit feed from my ISP. It's a pleasure to use. Things like web surfing and YouTube are done on it. I can even run the few old DOS apps on it, using the vDOS fork of the open source DOSBox emulator. vDOS is Windows specifric and intended to run character mode business apps. (There is extensive discussion on the WordStar list on how to configure it to run WS 7 on 64 bit Win 7 and Win 8.1 machines.) Folks complaining about the problems involved in trying to surf the web and view video from DOS are frankly wasting their time. It might be theoretically possible to enhance DOS support for such things, but it would be a significant development effort. Who would do it, and why would they bother? No one is going to *pay* to have it done, and there are more rewarding things to code for fun. > Ralf ______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=164703151&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
