Re: E-waste
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) May 03, 2013
- 5533 views
I've been using win-xp for 10+ years, but hardly a day goes by i don't open a doxbox or write a batch file.
If by "dosbox" you mean cmd.exe, then that's Windows, not DOS. And cmd.exe is also the default batch file interpreter for XP.
Matt
And yet, if the dosbox or the batch file was moved over to a 80286 DOS5 computer, it would still run the same. Likewise, if someone put a DOS version on their 3Ghz P4 i'd expect it to also run the same.
This is almost certainly correct in your case, but in general I'll contend that it's not true. cmd.exe adds many new features that aren't compatible with older versions of COMMAND.COM (though 4DOS typically supports these), and unless you know what you are doing and are careful to avoid it, it's possible nowadays to write a batch script that unintentionally will only run with cmd.exe (later versions of Euphoria's own configure.bat being an example, according to a FreeDOS thread).
Imo, dos's biggest issue was it's lack of modern filesystems and wider bit-widths and non-re-entrancy. Replace winxp's gui with a dos-lookalike written in Euphoria, i'd be happy with it, and i'd use it like i use the dosboxes now. There's one open now, there were three this morning, no doubt i'll pop open more as the day goes along.
I am using "dos" to refer to the look and feel, not to 15 year-old 16bit code.
Agreed. If nothing else, there's NTFSDOS. DrDOS came out with a 32bit pre-emptive version at one point in time. I'm not sure if FreeDOS has completely caught up yet, but it has an active community so I figure it is only a matter of time.
