The DOS 10 Commandments (fwd)

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Thu Mar 15 18:03:05 2001

It was thus said that the Great Peter Joules once stated:
>
> I assume that as DOS is over 10 yrs old this is on topic ;-)

  Released in 1981, yes it's on topic 8-)

> 2)
> Thy DOS is a character based, single user, single tasking, standalone
> operating system. Thou shall not attempt to make DOS network, multitask, or
> display a graphical user interface, for that would be a gross hack .

  Technically, it's a single taking, non-reentrant interupt based program
loader with a semi-reasonable file based API (2.x or higher) and that's
about it.

> 3)
> Thy hard disk shall never have more than 1024 sectors. You don't need that
> much space anyway.

  That's a BIOS limitation; talk to IBM about that one---they only allocated
10 bits for sector number in the INT 13h disk IO call.

> 4)
> Thy application program and data shall all fit in 640K of RAM. After all,
> it's ten times what you had on a CP/M machine. Keep holy this 640K of RAM,
> and clutter it not with device drivers, memory managers, or other things
> that might make thy computer useful.

  Again, IBM is to fault for that one---the IBM PC reserved the memory space
above $A0000 for video and BIOS extentions. There have been PCompatibles
running MS-DOS that had more memory available, but only programs that used
MS-DOS exclusively would work on those machines.

> 5)
> Thou shall use the one true slash character to separate thy directory path.
> Thou shall learn and love this character, even though it appears on no
> typewriter keyboard, and is unfamiliar. Standardization on where that
> character is located on a computer keyboard is right out .

  While COMMAND.COM would only accept `\' as a path separator, MS-DOS would
internally use both `/' and `\' for path separators. There is an MS-DOS
call to change the option character (from the default of `/') but I don't
remember what it was off the top of my head.

> 7)
> Know in thy heart that DOS shall always maintain backward compatibility to
> the holy 2.0 version, blindly ignoring opportunities to become compatible
> with things created in the latter half of this century. But you can still
> run WordStar 1.0

  Try 1.0. I still use an editor that was designed to run under MS-DOS 1.0.

> 10)
> Learn well the Vulcan Nerve Pinch (ctrl-alt-del) for it shall be thy saviour
> on many an occasion. Believe in thy heart that everyone reboots their OS to
> solve problems that shouldn't occur in the first place.

  Isn't that more of a Windows thing than an MS-DOS thing?

  -spc (Doesn't remember MS-DOS crashing quite so much ... )
Received on Thu Mar 15 2001 - 18:03:05 GMT