A Dog Day with DOS
by Paul McGoldrick
I never have bad hair days -- my hair is just there. But yesterday I had a really bad Microsoft day. It started far too early in the morning with power applied to a PC that brought up a completely frozen desktop time and time again. Then the weird stuff started: Applications opening themselves! Really, I'm not making this up.
At the end of a long day the PC was up and working on a later OS with the vast majority of files intact. The culprit, it turned out, was the driver files for a Zip drive that were corrupting the system -- go figure -- but it led me to think back on the history of DOS and Windows and how we continue to tolerate an incomplete and still unreliable product in the daily lives of many of us. Hell, we don't even own the software, we only license it under conditions that most of us have probably never read.
What became MS-DOS started life as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) developed by Seattle Computer Products, the rights to which were bought at fire-sale pricing by those who became the principals of Microsoft. This version 1.0 (1981) was very basic and only allowed the copying of data from one floppy to another and the ability to launch applications; it was also only offered as an option in the IBM 8088.
320 KB disks forced version 1.1 and double-sided disks forced 1.25 (new drives then allowed you to operate without turning the disk over.) But the big event, which really strained Microsoft's resources, was the advent of 10 MB hard drives. File organizations had to be completely changed, sub-directories were invented and supported and -- most significantly -- Microsoft allowed the idea of third-party vendors to put device drivers into DOS to allow the launching of their hardware. So my problems of yesterday had their origins in MS-DOS 2.0 dating from 1983.
There were other 2.x versions extending character sets and then there was a major jump in 1984 to 3.0 for 1.2 MB floppies and 32 MB hard drives; various 3.x versions then allowed networking, larger drives, partitioning, and PS/2. Windows 1.0 was around at the same time, but still limited to 640 KB of memory -- which was still true through Windows 2.0 in 1987. MS-DOS 4.0 (NOT the European 4.0 which was a huge success) was mainly an IBM product and was extremely buggy, with many programs refusing to run on it. But at least that was also the era when individual versions of MS-DOS, for different OEMs, came to an end as true IBM-compatibility became the norm and Microsoft could compete with OS/2 instead of partnering with IBM.
The last true versions of MS-DOS were 7.0 and 7.1 in Windows 95, and the quietly released (and not available for upgrade) Win95B. Version 7.1 was also in Windows 98 (and is still available for embedded products), whereas Windows Me (Millennium Edition) has MS-DOS 8.0 but no longer has an easy way of operating in a DOS mode.
Having to use DOS methods yesterday to get out of the mess I was in makes
me wonder about the future: complete back-ups and emergency disks are going
to have to be more rigorously attended to if people are not going to get
into really deep trouble. At least today is a good Microsoft day because
I can write about it instead of living through it.