MS-DOS is 30 years old today • Hacker News Board

Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today

#21

Post by Slackwise » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 7:05 PM UTC

> Thirty years ago, on July 27 1981, Microsoft bought the rights for QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for $25,000.

I have yet to see a definitive date for the creation of MS-DOS. This is just the date QDOS was purchased.

I run a public "Geeky Events" calendar[1] and the research I've done points to August 12th as the first date "MS-DOS" was created, but even that isn't 100%. Does anyone know the actual date?

[1]: https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=9t07jqib63if4k...

Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today

#22

Post by lawlypop » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 7:38 PM UTC

MS-DOS was my first experience with a computer. Great times.

Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today

#23

Post by jodoherty » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 7:41 PM UTC

iansinke wrote: post #20

Brings back memories of programming QBasic in the MS-DOS shell on Windows 98. Ah, those were the days.

You should check out FreeBASIC and Qb64. Maybe you can revisit some of those memories. :)

I remember learning VGA programming in C and assembly language how it was instrumental in helping me finally grasp just how low-level C really was. That's when I finally realized what pointers really were and just how useful and dangerous they could be.

Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today

#24

Post by pnathan » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 7:42 PM UTC

thought_alarm wrote: post #5

To celebrate, I'll buy the first round of drive letters and back-slashes.

Take them. Take them all. Please.

Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today

#25

Post by cfgvjkljhgfb » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 8:08 PM UTC

And 30years later I still have to deal with bugs because somewhere a "c:\note" wasn't escaped as a "c:\\note"

I can be on "c:", type cd "d:\data" and still be on c:

Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today

#26

Post by damoncali » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 8:16 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #7

Sweet DOS memories. I could probably still remember how to write CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that wring out every possible byte of <640K memory so that Ultima VII would run. (This game had a home-grown memory manager which required an obscene ~620K of so-called "real" memory while also requiring certain drivers that ate into that real memory, making it difficult to run the game without manually customizing the…

As soon as I saw this I was going to post about AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, the joy and pain of which were only surpassed by the hardware jumpers that occasionally tagged along. Long live DOS!

Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today

#27

Post by nikcub » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 11:36 PM UTC

jodoherty wrote: post #23

iansinke wrote: post #20

Brings back memories of programming QBasic in the MS-DOS shell on Windows 98. Ah, those were the days.

You should check out FreeBASIC and Qb64. Maybe you can revisit some of those memories. :) I remember learning VGA programming in C and assembly language how it was instrumental in helping me finally grasp just how low-level C really was. That's when I finally realized what pointers really were and just how useful and dangerous they could be.

sounds like you went through a similar routine to me. I had the Norton book - which was excellent. I had second hand or pirated copies of everything though.

my first thought on pointers was 'this can't be right because it is too dangerous, i can write a program to do anything!'

Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today

#28

Post by caf » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 11:41 PM UTC

yuhong wrote: post #10

yaix wrote: post #6

Congrats MS-DOS! I may not remember correctly, but wasn't it that MS-DOS 4.0 was replaced by 4.01 two days later or so? Also, typo below the MS-DOS 2.0 picture: It should be 5 1/4" (the floppy with the half one was 3 1/2").

Yea, the problem was the original 4.0 release was buggy.

The entire 4.0 release was considered pretty sub-par - it was common practice to remain on version 3.3 until 5.0 was released.

Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today

#29

Post by yuhong » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 11:58 PM UTC

yaix wrote: post #6

Congrats MS-DOS! I may not remember correctly, but wasn't it that MS-DOS 4.0 was replaced by 4.01 two days later or so? Also, typo below the MS-DOS 2.0 picture: It should be 5 1/4" (the floppy with the half one was 3 1/2").

You can't really tell from the picture, but actually per the original page it was actually 8-inch. You see, the MS-DOS disk is not for the IBM PC, but for the SCP 8086 card based S-100 system SCP 86-DOS was originally developed on before MS bought it. Anyone else remember it?

Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today

#30

Post by 5hoom » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 2:12 AM UTC

Probably the best legacy of MS-DOS is the number of kids it taught how to really use a computer.

When I got my first PC (486SX 33MHz FTW!) the ONLY way to run the best games was to get down & dirty with the command line. Soon you'd learn how to edit autoexec.bat/config.sys and how to zip big files to span several 1.44MB disks. Before you know it you're playing with BASIC, hex editing save game files & learning how to set up all sorts of ad-hoc networks with friends. Then came Doom & DEU & things really took off…

Those of us that wanted to see the latest 'cool-shiny' stuff on our computer had no choice but to learn about the ugly innards, & we got pretty good at this 'hacker' stuff as a result ;)