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Wings of Hope, my uncle volunteered for them. They use MS-DOS and Netware to control flight simulators and other old stuff.

NASA still uses PC-DOS based IBM PCs to control things.

DOS doesn't crash like Windows.

GRR Martin uses Wordstar and MS-DOS to write his novels because he does not want to be distracted by pop up windows and system alerts and updates.

3 comments

> DOS doesn't crash like Windows.

No, it crashes like DOS. I suppose if your application is well written and you have fully exercised the functionality that you use, it might be more stable, but "reliable" is not a word I would have associated with those systems.

If you a write a simple protected mode monitor and debug it well, your app (running under the abovementioned monitor) will be more stable than if it were running on Linux, Windows or other monstrosity.

It’s like embedded software. DOS is basically bug free at this point. If there are bugs in DOS, they are known.

ANY bugs will be in the application.

Or misconfigured CONFIG.SYS.

Or some clash with a TSR (sidekick?)

Indeed it doesn't crash, just hangs in some strange way that forces a reboot, or if you are lucky it affects the beeper that starts issuing random beep noises with different kinds of volume until you reach for the power button running like crazy,

Serious question from back in my young impressionable days of What Even Is This Square Thing Anyway:

I once wanted to copy/record the layout of a particular PC's boot up sequence, and (without a camera) got the great idea (uh oh) to use the Pause key while staring at the BIOS screen.

I think... I think it worked too well.

Once I'd copied the layout onto paper and hit a key to un-pause the system, it started behaving... very weirdly. I don't remember exactly what it did, but I do remember getting really freaked out because something was very wrong.

What I do remember was playing a game (to test/see if the system would settle back down) and, as time went on, keyboard input became progressively less and less responsive and erratic, and the system started beeping like crazy, almost like the keyboard input buffer had indigestion.

IIRC, the machine hung shortly thereafter and would not turn back on (read: initialize video and POST). O.o

To this day I still wonder what happened to that poor box, and a part of me wants to buy another AT&T Globalist 515 and film it to see if the fault(?) wasn't specific to my machine and maybe figure out exactly what happened.

My initial theory was flash corruption; it's also possible I overheated the CPU, especially given the lack of a heatsink, but it was a 486DX2-66, which didn't need a heatsink, and I'd used the Pause key in DOS plenty of times prior with no issues.

Your application crashes. DOS does not.

Amen! I never had a problem that wasn't bad hardware or my fault. All MS-DOS did was manage the disk, and keep track of time. There wasn't much to go wrong.

I guess you never wrote DOS applications, nor used it on its prime days.

I did; I mean that if the system crashes it's your application's fault, not DOS's.

How can you prove that?

I suspect that they're alluding to the fact that DOS was more of a program loader than an OS and that once it loaded your program it was your program that was in the driver's seat. BUT there are subtle issues with drivers and networking still.

I know that, but unless you can 100% guarantee that the application was clean from any kind of DOS interrupt calls, there are zero guarantees that it wasn't DOS, one of the drivers or the pseudo multitasking TSRs that were the culprit, there is no way to assert that the application was the one at fault.

I can't recall the last time I had a BSOD

Consider yourself lucky. I had a spate of BSODs a couple months ago presumably after some combination of Windows 10 updates and Lenovo updates on my work-issued ThinkPad. Rolling back updates didn’t seem to help. Finally went away after some other update installed. After the 5th one in maybe 10 days I was ready to have the machine wiped and reimaged (if I didn’t smash it with a sledgehammer first).