That is the funniest line I've read in weeks Who'd have thought that a computer system would be out of date after only 13 years.
I have a question too. I'm thinking of upgrading to a color monitor . . . . . . . . . . . .
I have some customers who are still running DOS, it just works. The only problem is that it may not run on this super newfangled hardware that's on the market these days. I have to dumpster dive and scavenge old boxes wherever I can find them for the old parts. :-)
TDD
Oh, good Lord. Any pretense you might have had to any hint of a shred of credibility has been utterly destroyed by your recommendation of what is arguably the worst OS that Monkeysoft has ever produced -- and they've had some turkeys. I mean, really. Win2K??? Even Win95 would be a better choice than that.
My God. What vintage software/hardware are we talking about? You couldn't get modern SATA drives with huge onboard caches (standard in contemporary PC's) to thrash that much even if you were deliberately alternately writing one byte to an innermost track and then one to the outermost track. What sort of language/IDE and hardware (and century) are we talking about?
-- Bobby G.
My TRS-80 uses cassette tapes for storage. Very handy.
You're right that keeping stuff in memory is a good idea - although hard drives buffer so well that recently accessed data, like lookup tables, aren't being read from the disk each time and really are like being in RAM.
Remember when RAM disks were a big hit? We had so much memory (640k!) that we could spare some of it to use as a virtual disk. Or was that the entended (expanded?) memory between the 640 and the 1 mb line? I forget.
Win7 makes great use of memory; it looks like it's all in use because Windows is using it while it would otherwise be idle. That's good programming, not being a memory hog. Oh, the Linux folks say, look at how much memory it uses! Well, yes, and it gives it back when some program actually needs it.
Win7 is a really good OS.
Sounds like a vi user talkin'. ;)
nb -- "vi, the root of evil!"
A concept lost on M$.
Why is that?
nb
Obviously written by a person who never had to use w95 for 8 hrs day for its lifetime.
nb
I put a loaded AST 6-pack in my original IBM PC and created a RAM drive at boot up, so I remember it. Think it cost me about $600 too. Forgot most of the DOS and memory configuration stuff since Windows left DOS as its underpinning. XP? Some folks like to play with old stuff, but not me.
I haven't looked at mem usage in Win7 after maybe the first week I installed it. Mostly to see how the quad core displayed it in the task manager. One son who was born after my first PC now guides me on PC selection when I upgrade, which is as seldom as possible. I end up deciding what I want, but he gets me on the right path quickly as far a processor. I never even looked into Linux, since I'm a gamer. Same with my kid. But he has a DOS box and uses DOS emulators so he can play old games. I just don't like horsing around to find drivers, endless tweaking, etc. Used to, but not any more. The Linux vs. Windows extravaganza reminds me of Chevy vs. Honda or AMD vs. Intel. Lots of fanaticism. The kid is also an over clocker and Intel "fan" vs AMD. He's set records overclocking chips using liquid hydrogen. A couple days ago he was over here and opened a box that came from ebay. Had about 10 different processors for him to burn up. Anyway, he'd be over here sometimes telling me about this argument or that argument and how he smoked some "asshole AMD fanboy." He'd get all hot cussing and comparing this chip against that chip. I'd tell him to calm down, it ain't worth getting your blood pressure up. A few times I just told him just shut the #$&@ up, you're boring me with this !@*$. That's worked best. Looks like the war between AMD and Intel is over, since he hardly talks about it any more.
Yup, has been for me. Been using the 64-bit for over a year and it's run anything I've thrown at it, no tweaking necessary. No hard reboots required.
--Vic
To the contrary, I had the misfortune of being required to use Win95 on the job for several years -- which is why I never installed it on any of my own machines. Apparently you've never used Win2K either at home or on the job, though, or you wouldn't even think of suggesting that someone use it. I stand by my statement: Even Win95 would be a better choice.
I was actually emulating a guy I do telecom and data networks with. Me and my old hippie roommate have begged the guy to let us write his professional correspondence for him because folks don't take him seriously when he contacts them about a job. He went to high school and majored in football, it's really embarrassing to look at his Emails and other attempts to communicate with others via the written word. :-(
Deer John, Ide liak 2 speek 2 U abowt thee data caballing 4 Ur stoar.
TDD
Used it for a short while, then dumped M$ altogether. I used WinNT successfully for awhile. Thought w2k was basically the same thing. It matters not. Haven't willingly used any of that M$ crap in years. I have an old crapped up XP box I use for Netflix streaming movies. Otherwise, I don't bother.
nb
One reason is that DOS has no knowledge of USB devices (or hard drives larger than 32Mb(?) ). Further, older machines don't HAVE USB ports (although a USB card can often be added). Wouldn't matter if they did, native DOS still can't access a USB port.
We have users of our DOS-version software of eleven years ago (when we came out with a Windows version). It still works. Even in our shop, we have a Compaq Portable II that runs DOS. We use it to monitor communication over a serial port. For what it does, it does it well.
Win2k is based on the NT kernel, which is far more stable than Win95 that runs atop DOS. For example, Win95 (or 98) has no knowledge of NTFS, a far superior file system compared to FAT32. Win2k has far better security features, and so on. You can tell by the names that Win2k is five years better than Win95.
This was dual DEC-10s running the entire medical care system, via CICS, for the largest hospital in Houston. It served over 700 terminals and processed over 10,000 transactions per hour - everything from doctor's notes to pharmacy inventory.
For example, a doctor would order a test. The lab would be notified and a list of equipment would be printed (how many test tubes containing what reagents) the tech would need, along with specimen labels, etc. At the conclusion of the test, the results would be entered on the patient's chart, the doctor notified, and appropriate charges forwarded to the accounting department.
'Course this was back in the day of "Big Iron." The whole thing, today, could probably run on the computer in a watch.
I've tried it and it's a disaster sometimes. I have had apps that slow down the CPU so the software would run but damn! It's easier to drag out old parts than to try to spend all day getting a DOS business application to function without GRONKING every 5 minutes. I just straightened out a Blockbuster video store that used DOS based software to run the applications. It runs serial at 38400 and 10/100 Ethernet on the same cable with a splitter setup on each end. It runs on some late model Lenovo ThinkCentre computers and uses com 1 to communicate with the server and the Ethernet goes to the credit card pen pads. It's loads of fun to spend hours on the phone with Indians I can barely understand to get that nightmare running.
I'm not a programmer but it seems to me that the DOS software I have a problem with was written for 16 bit machines back when my 386/20 was considered blindingly fast. Something to do with different address locations for memory, interrupts and timing. Like I wrote, I'm no programmer. Within the last decade, Domino's moved away from DOS/Win98 communicating with dumb serial terminals to Ethernet IBM ThinkCentre for terminals running Win2000 or XP then later to thin clients for terminals and I think it's embedded XP. I like thin clients because there is no fan to suck dust, cornmeal or flower into the darn things. They're a lot more trouble free when used in place of PC based terminals in the food service industry. Now if they would all ditch MS for Linux or BSD, I think there would be less trouble. ^_^
TDD
I never had that much trouble with Win2K and after all the bugs were worked out of XP, it's all that most of my customers use now and I don't really have much trouble with XP. Vista is the modern Windows Millennium and a similar horror story but what I've seen of Win7 seems to be OK but I don't own and run a copy yet. I'll take Win2K over Win95 any time. :-)
TDD
Nope. NT was quite stable. 2K was a POS.
Newer != better
MS-DOS 6.2 was newer than 6.0, too, but remember what a piece of crap 6.2 was?
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