Hi Ralf, good to focus on the “whys”.
You said: | “Nor would I do any graphics work in DOS, or any word | processing these days.” I did get into DOS because of “word processing”. More precisely it is a text-processing tool(!) EVA.EXE which was developed by Primož Jakopin in the 1970ies and 80ies, ported to TOS on Atari, in the 1990ies to DOS and WINDOWS. I re-discovered it last year on his site and also got in good contact with him. He still is working on it... I am especially interested in how the MOUSE is used in this particular program. 1.) The cursor can be “bound” to the mouse pointer. Move around in your text without the need to click your cursor into the text, which makes literally thousands of clicks obsolete. (Ergonomy) 2.) The mouse buttons can be assigned (in the Windows version) with whatever function you want. In the DOS version, it is assigned to LEFT=Delete RIGHT=Insert which make sense in this editor. I was researching the net and looking at many editors but never found this feature anywhere else. But in FreeDOS: Amazingly, the mouse in VDE Editor for DOS behaves the same way (without assigning commands to the mouse buttons, however. - This can be achieved using Bret Johson’s excellent “MOUSKEYS”) This singular feature makes me cope with the downsides of DOS but I have more reasons to use DOS. (I did already mention them in earlier Emails.) Moreover, I am a German native and Primož Jakopin is from Slovenia. Especially the letter was a challenge in the past (ASCII code page) to get all diacritics right. This has changed since, using UTF-8, which has appeared in DOS via MinEd, Blocek ed. al. And when it comes to “retro-computing”, it’s not all about hardware only. Still an excellent tool I consider TROFF, now GROFF, for Unix/Linux -which also exists for Windows, appeared in 1990 (Version 0.3.1) by James Clark) coming from “a text-formatting program called RUNOFF, which was written by Jerome H. Saltzer for MIT's CTSS operating system in the mid-1960s! If one focuses on text-processing, editing or “word processing” and looking at the development there is really little progress even possible. I use the MARKDOWN syntax in FreeDOS which is very cool and can easily later be used for websites or printing when exported. I am still wondering if there might be a comparable product like the “Raspberry” but for an architecture that allows for FreeDOS natively? Regards, Thomas > On Thu,20210422- week16, at 18:55, Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 4/22/2021 3:21 AM, Thomas Desi wrote: >> There are many different reasons why people would want to install FreeDOS >> (if they get to know it). >> „ Different" like in „different people“. The needs and equipments are >> different and the mixture of technical generations >> should not restrain FreeDOS, IMHO, to „retro computing“ and nostalgia only. >> Nostalgia is very much ok and brings up new and other thoughts, too. But >> there is 2021, too. >> I understand that there is a difference when installing on to Harddisk and >> booting, or just having a USB Stick and using it on top of Linux or Windows. >> It depends, as I say, on what people want, and - what they could want if the >> just knew… > Well, here I think lays a huge problem for us (the FreeDOS project), a lot of > people don't seem to know what they want. There are always a number of people > showing up at random times, who come up with all kinds of glorious ideas or > serious (in their eyes) complaints as what to add or change in FreeDOS. > Which, when looked at it at the baseline of those ideas, would result in a > second coming of Linux. > These are a lot of times people that voice their grievances about how bad > Windows/Microsoft is, even if the only practical reason is that it seems to > be en vogue in certain circle to bash on Windows/Microsoft. > Or there are those people that can't cope with the alleged complexity of > Linux, thinking of (Free)DOS as being their savior, but then requiring all > those complexities, which would result in something that is looking like just > another Linux. Or Windows. Or macOS... > > It seems to be hard for some people to see that FreeDOS is indeed a lot more > retro than cutting edge. And that some things just are not a real fit for > FreeDOS. Like someone on the FB page recently suggesting that it would be > great to have a Apache/MySQL/PHP stack on FreeDOS. Without actually thinking > about or realizing that the very design of DOS makes such an endeavor rather > unfeasible... > > How do I use FreeDOS? Well, not as an everyday tool. I certainly won't bother > to use the Internet (email, web browsing, etc) with it. Those are things that > I can do much easier,much more efficient in Linux or Windows. Nor would I do > any graphics work in DOS, or any word processing these days. Again, those > things can be done much better, with way more options, on any modern GUI > bases OS. > > What I would like to do is however to do some retro computing, even if it is > just "for fun", as it reminds me on how I got started with computers almost > 45 years ago. And have seen them developing. I would like to use DOS on some > SBC/maker projects where I could make use of a text based UI or a basic, > proved, lightweight file system as is DOS with FAT. And that doesn't exclude > certain embedded commercial/industrial applications as well, where DOS would > introduce much less overhead than even the most trimmed down Linux can do. > And where you can do development on such systems without having to deal with > multi-megabyte tool chains and multitude of rabbit holes that lead into > dependency hell... > > > Ralf > > > -- > This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. > https://www.avast.com/antivirus > > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
