I’ve always found the world of DOS versions and variants to be confusing, since most of it took place when I was very young (I’m from 1984) so I wasn’t paying much attention to computing quite yet, other than playing DOS games. One of the variants of DOS I never quite understood where it was from until much, much later, was DR-DOS. To this day, I pronounce this as “Doctor DOS”.
If you’re also a little unclear on what, exactly, DR-DOS was, Bradford Morgan White has an excellent article detailing the origins and history of DR-DOS, making it very easy to get up to speed and expand your knowledge on DOS, which is surely a very marketable skill in the days of Electron and Electron for Developers.
DR DOS was a great product. It was superior to other DOS versions in many ways, and it is certainly possible that it could have been more successful were it not for Microsoft Windows having been so wildly successful. Starting with Windows 95, the majority of computer users simply didn’t much care about which DOS loaded Windows so long as it worked. There’s quite a bit of lore regarding legal battles and copyrights surrounding CP/M and DOS involving Microsoft and Digital Research. This has been covered in previous articles to some extent, but I am not really certain how much would have changed had Microsoft and Digital Research got on. Gates and Kildall had been quite friendly at one point, and we know that the two mutually chose not to work together due to differences in business practices and beliefs. Kildall chose to be quite a bit more friendly and less competitive while Gates very much chose to be competitive and at times a bit ruthless. Additionally, Kildall sold DRI rather than continue the fight, and DRI had never really attempted to combine DR DOS with GEM as a cohesive product to fight Windows before Windows became the ultimate ruler of the OS market following Windows 3.1’s release. Still, it was an absolutely brilliant product and part of me will always feel that it ought to have won.
Bradford Morgan White
I can definitely imagine an alternative timeline in which Digital Research managed to combine DR-DOS with GEM in a more attractive way, stealing Microsoft’s thunder before Gates’ balls got rolling properly with Windows 3.x. It’s one of the many, many what-ifs in this sector, but not one you often hear or read about.
Thom Holwerda,
Yes, there are so many ways the history of computing was determined by fortunate (or unfortunate) connections and coincidences rather than anything to do with the quality of MS products. IMHO MS won many of their battles thanks to their rather exclusive industry connections. I have my doubts that MS would have ended up dominating the PC markets on merits alone if it weren’t for this.
Alfman,
Arguably Microsoft was the “whole package”. They not only had good engineers, and marking staff, they also had very good business acumen.
And when they lacked a feature, they would simply say “it will be available in the next version of DOS”, and people would wait instead of switching to a competitor.
Not saying they were honest saints of computing, far from it. They were very much anti-competitive. However as long as they delivered “usable” software (“good enough”) they kept their customers captive.
(In other words, delivering a single technical achievement is not enough to gain marketshare)
sukru,
This is one of those things where there’s a serious discrepancy between morality and success. Like how the tech giants found ways to evade paying taxes on billions of dollars in revenue. Is it very good business acumen? Sure, it’s hard to argue with the financial results, but at the very same time these corporations that aren’t paying their share of taxes will be responsible for millions of retirees not getting their social security payments at retirement. When corporations go rent seeking – extracting money by controlling markets rather than improving markets by providing value – is this the kind of success we should be putting on a plateau? On the one hand business schools might use these as case studies on how to succeed, after all it works. But on the other hand it makes the world significantly worse when businesses are willing and able to enrich themselves through rotten business practices.
Alfman,
Other things aside, this is important:
This is a common misinformation that is very pervasive. As the Social Security system is designed to be self funded from wages, and how much you contribute should be neutral. In other words, regardless of whether you contribute $100 per month or $1000 per month, the fund should be sustainable.
(Similar to 401k, but smoothed over the entire generations)
The problem it is in dire straits and people give the wrong idea that current generation is not contributing enough, is that they have broken the system a few decades ago.
Ideally,
1) They should always course correct. If the funds are down, they should take corrective action, including benefit cuts
2) They should have never included unfunded benefits, like medicare part d, or spousal benefits
3) They should have actually invested in a real fund, instead of putting them into treasury funds, that gives basically 0% over inflation.
It is mismanagement, and adding more money will only make it worse as is (the system promises $2 for every $1 you put in, with a investment return of 0%, go do the math).
And once again, companies have nothing to do with it, as it is entirely enclosed in the wages.
sukru,
Ideally it would be true and you’d get all the money you put in, but actually that is false and I don’t think it’s ever been true since SS was created. The money we pay goes into a general fund that is NOT earmarked for the payers who are paying in The benefits are loosely connected to the years worked, etc, but the money is not reserved for you and that is exactly why SS is on schedule not to be able to pay benefits – the money does not get earmarked for those paying into the system.. For better or worse the government’s ability to pay out SS depends on taxes.
Damn, I lost a post before I could submit it. Bah, I wanted to cover this article…
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/06/1249406440/social-security-medicare-congress-fix-boomers-benefits
The money that the baby boomers paid is long gone. The money we pay in today doesn’t get saved to pay for our retirements, it goes to pay for the current retirees. Since the baby boomers were a large generation and subsequent generations are smaller, it creates additional strain on our generation to pay social security funding. We’ll have to pay more to cover the baby boomers. And unless something were to change, there is currently not enough left to pay ourselves.
And there it is, congress has to decide which is more important: funding social security benefits, or continuing to offer tax cuts for the wealthy. We cannot ignore the impact that tax policies have on social programs since they are linked.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-pass-through-deduction-is-tilted-heavily-to-the-wealthy-is-costly-and
I remember playing around with DR-DOS … 7? I think? Was around the time of Windows 95. I was experimenting with DR-DOS, Windows for Workgroups, OS/2 Warp 3.0, and Windows 95 OSR2 on my 486DX4/133 system. It originally came with Win95, but I didn’t really like it after years of using DOS and Windows 3.1.
DR-DOS provided a lot more conventional RAM (the stuff under 640K) and better memory management (for accessing everything above 640K) so it made for a nicer DOS-based gaming experience. Didn’t have to play around with as many different boot disks with customised config.sys/autoexec.bat files for different games. I think my best setup had just over 600K available, with sound, CD, and mouse drivers loaded. And you could always run Windows 3.x on top.
I had a working setup with DR-DOS and Windows 95 for a little bit. Didn’t really provide much benefit once all your hardware had proper Windows drivers available, but it made for nicer “reboot to DOS Mode” for when the DOS game didn’t like running in a window.
Much preferred OS/2 Warp, though. Even if I had to do a weird layering setup with Win-OS/2 running with the modem driver loaded, so I could dial-in to the university modem pool (stupid WinModems!) in order to have Internet access in OS/2. SmartSuite on OS/2 was a dream to use compared to MS Office 6/95. Although, I still prefer WordPerfect 2000+ to any other office suite, but I didn’t start using that until later. DR-DOS had no place in an OS/2 setup, and the DOS compatibility that came with OS/2 was “good enough”, although I never really used it.
Finally had to file DR-DOS away for good once Windows 98 was released. Was never able to get Win98 running on DR-DOS. By that point, DOS was basically just the boot loader and Windows managed all the hardware directly, except when booting into DOS Mode. But, MS-DOS 7.1 was good enough for the few remaining DOS games I had.
By the time Windows XP arrived, there wasn’t much else to use … until I discovered FreeBSD!
“SmartSuite on OS/2 was a dream to use compared to MS Office 6”
Somewhat offtopic, but I had a copy of this on the shelf and just installed it recently. Mine was the “original” one with Ami Pro 3.0b, and 1-2-3/G, FG/G. The latter two aged very badly. These two look to have been initial ports to OS/2 in the late 80s which had been kicked forward with minimal maintenance, to the point that they don’t use the system menu bar. Ami Pro was decent though. Did you have a newer one (SmartSuite 97 era?) I’m a bit surprised since that was after Warp 4, which was after most of the OS/2 enthusiasm was gone.
I misremember that one. It was Lotus Smartsuite, but the Windows version. It was all nicely integrated, all the menus and toolbars were similar, the icons were all the same throughout the different applications. But it was the pop-up dialogs that really improved workflow. Little tabbed windows that provided access to all kinds of advanced features, that updated based on what you were currently doing in the suite. It initially took some getting used to, but made writing papers for university so much smoother. It made a full suite of separate applications work and act like the old one-binary-to-do-it-all Microsoft Works.
Compared to the mess that was MS Office on Windows 3.x and 95 where each application did things slightly differently, used different colour schemes and icons from the rest of the OS, used internal file dialogs that worked different from the standard OS ones, and so on. I hated MS Office 95, 97, and XP. 2003 was the only one I “liked” using, and that was only because it was practically mandated at work, and the last one before the horrid ribbon interface appeared.
My favourite office suite, though, remains WordPerfect Office 2000. Reveal Codes saved my bacon so many times over the years when formatting large (30+ page) documents. Would import Word documents into WordPerfect to fix formatting issues, thanks to Reveal Codes. And Quattro Pro ran circles around Excel for large spreadsheets (the only limit on number of rows or columns was the amount of virtual memory in the system; compared to the 32768 or 65535 limit in Excel). Never found a use for the database program, though. The really nice thing is that Corel shipped a version for Linux that worked just like the Windows version (I later realised it used WINE behind the scenes).
These days, it’s LibreOffice, Google Docs, or the web version of MS Office apps.
phoenix,
Personally I liked office 97, and later 2003. Excel had been one of my favorite MS apps until then. I hated the ribbon with a passion though, It actually motivated me to look at alternatives. This was even before I went to linux. It just goes to show that one of the most important things in business is to not shoot yourself in the foot, haha. This seems to be a big problem for microsoft, they’ve got paying customers who really want to like their stuff, but microsoft are determined to throw that away. And it happens with enough regularity that’s it’s become a pattern. It’s hard to comprehend why microsoft provokes their own users into looking for alternatives. It just seems counterproductive.
I used wordstar for DOS, but was not familiar with wordperfect.
I never tried that either, I might have liked it. I was a kid though, so I just used what we had and that was it, haha.
“BatteryMAX … was controlled by IDLE ON or IDLE OFF (turning on power saving, or turning off power saving respectively). I haven’t actually found any drivers for this feature”
…enter MichalN: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/idle-dr-dos/
Only today do I learn that DOS Plus (I used it a bit on a PC1512) was the ancestor of DR DOS… Thx!
You didn’t have any choice with win95, it loaded the DOS it came with. You could only choose the DOS with win 3.x and earlier.
Nope, you could boot/run Windows 95 using DR-DOS 7. It wasn’t “easy” but it was doable. And it made for better DOS gaming, as you could “Reboot to DOS Mode” and get a working DR-DOS environment. Here’s info from one of the DR-DOS 7.x devs:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/109018-windows-98-in-dr-dos/
Windows 98 and WinME could only run with the version of DOS they shipped with, though. But, you could always boot off DR-DOS floppies if you wanted a DR-DOS based environment to run DOS games.
phoenix,
Thanks for the link, it is quite interesting. Microsoft always had the advantage here. They could, and did, intentionally break competing software. Those shenanigans had a major impact on the viability of competitors in the software market, and regulators basically let microsoft off with a slap on the wrist. Given the weak track record for antitrust regulators, it’s no wonder today’s corporations don’t feel obligated to take them seriously. We’ve been letting them get away with their antitrust behaviors without any repercussions. Free market competition is dying and frankly we owe much of that to the inability/unwillingness of regulators to do their jobs and protect us from the abuse of dominant corporations.
True, to a point.
Windows 95 was “enhancing” DOS at the same time. To be fair, they had no choice in some parts, like passing though drivers to 32-bit mode, instead of slower BIOS based disk access. Or long file names, and other features that depended on DOS changes.
Could they have published these as an API, and let other DOS providers run Windows 95? Sure.
Would they do it for free? OR actually for a negative return? Of course not.
I thought though that because so many of the changes were to pass things through to 32-bit mode, the changes to DOS itself were minimal. Take long file names: these were implemented within the Win95 environment only. The DOS kernel just needed to not trivially discard them, but the LFN design was chosen to ensure DOS 6 wouldn’t trivially discard them either. AFAIK most changes for LFNs were in the tools (eg. command.com needed to understand quotes and call the new APIs.)
I’m guessing (but don’t know) that the Win98/DR-DOS issue will be related to FAT32 in some way. No matter how many enhancements happen at the top layers, DOS still needs to be able to understand FAT32 to boot.
I do know that I had a Win98 beta with a timebomb, and defeated the timebomb by using an OSR2 version of DOS under it, so the coupling wasn’t terribly strong.
Microsoft does it best to render incompatible Windows with DR-DOS (old guys can remember the “Non-fatal error detected” when running WIN.COM), this was the begin of the end of DR-DOS. DR-DOS was rapidly becoming the “standard DOS”, as it was faster and easier (es. you don’t need 4DOS to get a decent prompt instead of COMMAND.COM). I can remember well what happened.
See more here: https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/
Zedder105,
I didn’t remember, but +1 for an insightful link!
Alfman,
There is also the infamous:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10432608
Yeah Microsoft of the 90s were using their monopoly power to crush all sorts of competitors: DR-DOS, stacker, lotus, wordperfect, stacker, BE, netscape, Artisoft, Sun, etc. Banning OEMs from installing competing products and even tricking their own “partners” with surprise power plays, such as the way MS licensed IE from Spyglass for a cut of sales when microsoft had no intention of actually selling IE. At the original developers got $8M out of MS after winning in court, but MS wasn’t a good faith partner.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/remembering-internet-explorer-the-now-dead-browser-that-once-powered-the-internet/
To me it just seems like a very negative and shameful way to run a business. But arguably not being bound by ethical constrants gives you an edge others who are. This is a gut wrenching conclusion for ethics, but the lesson may be that you can get further ahead if you’re willing to ignore the harm you do to others.
Alfman,
I agree on other points. But the reason alternative browsers, or rather the only one; Netscape, failed was their own self doing.
Netscape 4.0(?) was slow, buggy, crashing, and would occasionally freeze entirely for no reason, with only “blink” tag as the innovation (okay, I am exagerating)
Compared to that Internet Explorer was faster, cleaner, and had more features.
Complacency of market leaders is a major reason for their downfall. (Once again, IE 8+ later on had the same issues which led to massive increase in Firefox and later Chrome installs).
sukru,
I used NN4 and I don’t really agree with that. I guess it depends on what you grew up using, but NN was more capable with layers than IE was. Even if some people felt it had merit over NN, it’s overnight growth was obviously thanks to the MS monopoly.
Alfman,
We might have slightly different memories. But basically Netscape 4.0 was the last version it was competitive against IE (IE 4.0 was also buggy, but IE 5.0 changed everything).
As far as I remember, NN4 would:
– Crash on random times
– Had significant delays rendering table layouts, even worse, running this on UI thread, blocking the entire application
– Introduced a bunch of non-standard tags (which IE also did) causing IE or NN only pages (again, both are to be blamed here)
Nevertheless, today we expect web browsers to be available as part of the operating system (more or less all of them, including gaming consoles have one). Back in the day, we expected browsers to be free and open source (Mosaic).
In between the two…
Only for a short period of time there was a viable market for commercial web browsers (NN, Opera, and others)
Fun fact:
Both Internet Explorer and Netscape were commercial closed source forks of the original NCSA Mosaic Browser:
https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/642bc391-c692-18c3-9611-c3a4e284a2ef/47e83fcf-b3a1-11ec-84e0-0200008a0da4
https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/3536c38e-442a-c2b4-11c3-a4e284a2c3a5/986e8b3c-ca8e-11ec-b931-0200008a0da4
I had the fortune to have an internship with the program manager of the original Mosaic team. Unfortunately I lost the mug he gifted me
sukru,
It’s not that I disagree with your points here, but it does seem to overlook microsoft’s systematic abuses of the market. It was not a fair playing field and monopoly would target competitors by going to OEMs and contractually prohibiting them from doing business with microsoft’s competitors. This was integral to microsoft’s business strategy in those days. If not for antitrust regulators coming in, the microsoft monopoly was unstoppable, Competitors like google wouldn’t exist if courts hadn’t put an end to microsoft’s abusive tactics.
Alfman,
Yes of course, their deals with OEMs were nothing less than shameful.
My only point was, the browser market, … they won pretty much on merit… Until once again they lost on merit (who would want to use IE8 on purpose)?
sukru,
Those points are contradictory though. It necessarily downplays the antitrust crimes, for which microsoft were convicted specifically in regards to netscape because the evidence against MS was so damning.
Say a race car team disables an opponent’s car, goes on to win the race, and then claims it doesn’t really matter because they won anyways. Fans of either team can speculate which team would have won on a level playing field, but it is not reasonable to say it was won on merit. Same applies to microsoft, they lost the right to say they “won on merit” when they illegally interfered with netscape’s market to ensure netscape couldn’t win. It’s the polar opposite of winning on merit.
Alfman.
Food for thought.
If Microsoft sabotaged Netscape, why was it unstable on Linux or even Mac?
For example:
http://old.macedition.com/cb/nn4crashers/