Re: DOS (was Re: Re Robot)

On Tue, Sep 12, 2000 at 10:09:13PM -0400, Padraic Brown wrote:
[snip]
> I don't know. Windoz are nice and the gui environment has a number
> of things to commend it; but there ain't nuthin like talkin direct
> (or _reasonably_ directly) to the computer. One reason why I won't
> switch to the New and Unimproved version of Windoz is that there is
> no DOS mode available.
[snip]

**WARNING: Shameless, off-topic, Linux advocacy follows ***

If you think DOS was good, Unix shells will blow you away. I'm a fellow
Windoz-hater like you; I stuck with DOS for as long as I could, but I soon
realized that the demise of DOS is at hand -- it's simply too obsolete to
do anything useful anymore. But I found something better: Linux.

Full-multitasking, with BOTH a GUI and command-line interface (i.e.,
DOS-style but WAYYYYY more powerful, and I mean, WAAAYYY more powerful --
DOS is but a pale shadow of a full Unix shell), completely free (esp. if
you use a Linux distribution like Debian), and very un-bloated. I mean,
heck, the entire Linux kernel only takes up 600KB (yes, KB not MB!!!) on
my computer, with dynamic modules it goes up to only 1MB or so. Compare
the Windows core, which takes multi-hundred megabytes.

Talking directly to your computer? Try a shell like BASH or TCSH on
Linux... you'll love it. It's 100 times more powerful than DOS, too. Plus,
you can use it *together* with one of the many GUI systems available: the
shell isn't crippled like the command prompt under Windows is -- you can
access the full capabilities of both the underlying system and the GUI
from the command prompt.

I've not touched Windows or any Microsoft product for more than 2 years,
and I'm as happy as can be. My Linux system is SOOO much more stable than
Windows -- one time I had it up for more than 150 *days* without needing
to reboot. (And the only reason I rebooted after that was to change some
hardware components). And it can do *so* much more than a typical Windows
system without slowing down to a crawl -- I run a webserver, an ftp
server, a mail server, and a router, *and* still am able to use it for
normal work (mail, programming, playing music, etc.) with not a trace of a
slowdown. Although now I'm on a pentium II 333MHz, I run an almost
identical setup on a Pentium 90MHz and it was still more efficient than
Windows considering the kinds of things it was running.

And I'm so sorry this is off-topic again... but I just thought you might
be interested in a *better*, *free* alternative to Windows... especially
since you seem to be the kind of person, like me, who likes to open the
hood and tinker around underneath, so to speak.


T