Stephen wrote:

> You probably don't remember what it was like to run DOS in the 80's.
> Batch files ruled :)

Oh, I think I do actually... Certainly even into the 90's, even though 
Windows was around, batch files still ruled. That or QBASIC.

[Where I work, we have some analytical software that was written 
in-house. It's written in QBASIC. For legal reasons I am required to 
keep it in working order. I AM NOT JOKING. Mercifully, since it's 
QBASIC, there isn't actually a lot that can really go wrong - it's 
blissfully unaware of most of its surroundings. But suffice it to say 
that printing to a networked laser printer is... interesting?]

And let us not forget how much scripting I did in AmigaDOS. Unlike 
MS-DOS, this had real processing capabilities vaguely moddelled after 
Unix, not to mention a small cottage industry of scriptable GUI components.

Under AmigaDOS, "more" was a GUI program! A minimal one, granted - but 
that's why everybody used "PPmore". PP = PowerPacker, referring to this 
program's ability to natively open PP files without having to invoke PP 
to unpack them first. But everybody used it for its wildly superiod GUI...

That's one thing I liked about the Amiga. So long as your LIBS: folder 
contained a copy of powerpacker.library, every program in the system 
that did anything involving PP files would work fine. I gather that both 
Unix and Windoze are supposed to work the same way... but you don't get 
to see it in practice.

Possibly my poudest achievement was splitting my OS disk across two 
floppies. This required me to completely require the boot script so that 
it rewired all the search paths dynamically, so half the files were on 
the boot floppy and half on another one, but the OS could still find all 
of them immediately. It's a lot more work than it sounds, but it worked 
magnificantly.

[Again, I suppose theoretically you could do the same thing to a Linux 
distro with enough symlinks. But since I have absolutely NO CLUE how 
Linux actually works and this does not appear to be documented 
anywhere........]

>> Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT 
>> and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order 
>> looking for one that actually functioned?
> 
> Very true :)

Ooo, ooo, and... TOKEN RING! Remember that?? Trying to get MS-DOS 
powered PCs to talk to each other over a token ring network... Never 
tried it personally, but I watched first-hand, and it wasn't pretty.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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