[GEM Development] Liam Proven! DOS in VirtualPC

[Liam Proven]

On 9 December 2017 at 18:49, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
>
> It's the overall feel, I suppose.  It just doesn't feel right to me (oddly,
> FreeDOS, which is far more broken than DR DOS, gets the feel down a lot
> better).
>
[...]
>
> It's hard to describe, really.  But since DR DOS introduced different
> features, or introduced them in a different way (usually earlier) than MS,
> it has a noticeably different feel - and I just feel more comfortable with
> the real thing...although Datalight ROM-DOS came pretty close when it was
> freely available.

Are you talking about 5, 6 or 7 here?

5 was quite unlike MS-DOS 3.x/4, because it introduced so many new features.

MS-DOS 5 caught up and copied them all: memory management (from
Windows 3), full-screen editor (from QBASIC, based off QuickBASIC for
DOS), bundled cache (from Windows 3),  etc.

(And of course, because MS dominated the market, I saw and worked with
a _lot_ more MS-DOS 5 than DR-DOS anything.)

So DR-DOS 6 supported almost all of MS's syntax for CONFIG.SYS,
AUOTEXEC.BAT, additional commands and so on... and added disk
compression.

MS-DOS 6 copied that -- literally, stealing code from STAC's Stacker
-- and a better disk-checker and so on.

Novell DOS 7 copied that and added peer-to-peer networking.

Microsoft switched to Win95 -- which of course included networking
anyway -- and that's mostly where it ended.

IBM picked up the baton and continued development on PC-DOS for a
while. It brought in the changes from Windows 95OSR2 and Windows 98 --
FAT32 and so on. It dropped disk compression. It binned MS' BASIC and
editor and replaced them with Rexx and a cut-down version of its E
editor from OS/2 (the origin of SlickEdit).

PC-DOS 7 is slightly more mainframe-flavoured, with Rexx and its
editor and so on.

But what I'm getting at is that DR DOS 6 was more akin to MS-DOS 5
than DR DOS 5 was. Novell DOS 7 was closer still.

Enhanced DR-DOS is based off the Novell DOS 7 code, so it's very
microsoft-like. It's more MS-DOS compatible than FreeDOS, IMHO.

If you're basing your opinion on DR DOS 5, that was over 25y ago and
you need to try something newer.

So yes, I prefer MS DOS, ideally, and failing that PC DOS, and failing
that DR DOS, but that's the order, in terms of how it feels. FreeDOS
is a distant outlier.


-- 
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