On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 6:45 PM, Matej Horvat <matej.hor...@guest.arnes.si> wrote:
> So the fact that DOS was used is completely irrelevant, though it is nice > to know it's being used. :) DOS pops up in odd places. In 2006, I attended LACon IV, the 54th annual World Science Fiction Convention, held that year in Los Angeles, CA. The Worldcon attracts about 5,000 attendees. Registration for the event was handled in DOS. They had a batch of ancient laptops with a 3.5" floppy drive but no HD. They booted from a DOS floppy, and ran DBase III. Once DBase was running, they swapped in a data disk where registration info was stored as people registered. When registration got busy, they added more registrars and handed out more old laptops. Once an hour or so, they'd do a synchronization operation so everyone had a current copy of the database. The registration head who set up the system had been a programmer at Ashton-Tate back when, and "wrote some of the more annoying stuff in DBase III". I was tickled. Most such conventions use networked PCs with the database residing on a backend server, or perhaps terminals connected to a multi-user server running Linux. This dispensed with servers, networks, and current PCs, using only ancient recycled hardware and MS-DOS era software. It did the job while eliminating several levels of complexity and cost. I told the guy who set it all up that it was a perfectly valid approach, and one I would not have thought of. I was impressed, and said so. ______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Time is money. Stop wasting it! Get your web API in 5 minutes. www.restlet.com/download http://p.sf.net/sfu/restlet _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
