A Public Service Announcement

[kjn]

DOS is easy to troubleshoot.

This PSA has been brought by you by the letters A, H and E.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Are you sure you don't mean 'was'?

And yes, DOS itself is nigh-trivial to troubleshoot -- as would be the small subset of the linux kernel and about half a dozen tools that you'd need to replicate everything DOS does.

And back then, hardware was distinctly harder to troubleshoot, what with jumpers for IO addresses, IRQs and DMA lines.

Oh, and DOS only stays easy until you add in high and expanded memory and optimising your autoexec for every last kB of usable memory despite your crushing workload of TSRs, that might be as much as a total of 50 to 100 kilobytes.

[kjn]

No, it's is. But the big reason to post this has to do with Swedish fannish history (the letters A, H and E).

[dlganger.livejournal.com]

Bah, even with all that, it was still easy to troubleshoot. Run a DOS BBS for a couple of years -- that'll teach you memory optimizing tricks that MEMMAKER.EXE never heard of.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

memmaker? People used that? I constructed all my config.sys and autoexec.bat files by hand back in the day. After DOS 5, when you could build in menu options? That was awesome. I had different boot options for Windowd 3.1, various games depending on how they wanted the the extended memory presented, RAMdisk configs (I had 16MB back when 4 was a lot and most people were still running 486SXs with 1). I still have a retail copy of 6.something (whatever the final release was) around here somewhere. VirtualPC doesn't support it and VMware doesn't work on Vista64 yet. Once I can, I'm totally playing Mechwarrior2 again.

[dlganger.livejournal.com]

yes, a lot of people used it, and it quickly become a matter of pride to beat it at its own game.

[corruptedjasper.livejournal.com]

Apologies for that, I appear to not have been logged in.