> I was an expert in DOS manual memory management and could usually get > circa 620 kB free conventional memory even on a heavily-loaded machine > with multimedia, an optical drive and a network stack. > > These skills are completely obsolete and redundant these days.
Have you written down your tips and tricks for this anywhere? I find these sorts of things interesting to read, mostly for nostalgia reasons - as in finally learning about things that mystified me when I was younger. Given the upswing in retro-gaming (as you can see by the increase in eBay prices for DOS-compatible hardware over the last few years), it seems more and more people who grew up with DOS games are now reaching the age where they have the time and financial means to go build the DOS PC they always wanted. Knowing how to set it up better than you ever could back in the day would be something quite valuable. I've lost count of the number of new discoveries about old hardware I wish I could've gone back and told myself about 20 years ago! Personally I have a collection of hardware from the 1990s that I picked up cheap over the years (often for free as people were throwing it out as obsolete) and my goal is to one day set up a small computer lab with it all. That's the point where getting network drivers loaded while still having enough free memory to run the games themselves would be very useful! As to the original question, while I only use DOS for nostalgia reasons, I think it makes an excellent teaching tool for learning how modern computers work. It's especially useful for people who wish to run Windows, as many conventions that started with DOS (such as drive letters) are still used today. But DOS exposes everything at a much lower level so it makes it easier for a beginner to get a feeling for how the machine is affected by what they do. Even modern Windows is having a bit of a resurgence when it comes to the command line, so all the skills DOS users learned with command line programs are even more relevant today in the world of Windows than they ever have been before. It is, after all, my "obsolete" DOS skills that have allowed me, in an office setting, to show people how to do things like get a list of files in a directory into a text file, manipulate them with an Excel formula, produce a set of rename commands, and then run them in a command prompt to do a bulk rename of a few hundred files. Tasks like this are things you cannot do entirely via the default GUI and the first thing people do (who aren't familiar with DOS) is jump on Google and look for a program that can do it for them. These often cost money and/or are filled with ads (or worse) and are usually massive downloads because of all the awful graphics they come with to bulk out the program, to disguise the fact that it doesn't actually do much at all. But a few simple commands unchanged since early versions of DOS can do it in no time, with no additional software installs required. So being familiar with DOS can still to this day give you skills that are useful with even the latest computers and operating systems. Cheers, Adam. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
