With all the talk of what a relief it is to switch to Linux, I just could
not resist this one:
I started out on the big machine Unix OSes - Solaris, BSD - before I knew
I thing about dos. Then I bought my 486 (the one I am still writing on),
maybe about 1994 to write resumes and such. I still know Unix pretty well and
went through the whole transition to X-windows as it was happening, and the
GUIs being installed on top of Unix, etc.
I'm still practically and artistically thrilled with my current DOS, even
though I start like most, upset with Microsoft's seemingly almost intentional
nutty decisions about it.
I have hundreds of elegant, freeware dos programs, most free, that do 90% of
the practical things ordinary users do with PCs -- calendars, spreadsheets,
checkbook balancers, word processing, image viewing/editing, -- and on and
on.
Dos still takes care of 95% of my internet needs - every aspect of email
the other oses do, usenet news, telnet, ftp. Lynx still works for most of
my web browsing needs, including ``secure'' https transactions and forms.
Once in a blue moon I fire up my netscape 4.8 on win 3.1 to decipher a
site that is just too horribly put together.
The only thing I miss on my Dos/based 486 is real time audio and radio shows.
And if I devoted some effort to buffering and such, I could probably get that
going too.
I have not become a GUI addict, although of course I have to work with
win this and that at work. But dos also contains all sorts of more
efficient, gui-like windows explorer type desktops and such, that allows
people to drag and drop until they drag and drop -- if they really want to.
Added programs and patches have removed most of its original, built in
defects -- e.g., 32-bit programs, most of the unix shells and tools I
like (perl, emacs if you must, vi, sed, lex, etc.).
The only major factor against it I can think of is that it is ``old'' --
development has mostly stopped except for embedded systems. But so what?
What am I missing about the need to rush to linux? What will I be missing
out on?
-------------------
p.s., my dos word processor solution is different than the famous word
perfect 5.1: I use the unix inspired troff (gnu version) with ghostscript
to send the HP printer language stuff to my inkjet. Troff was an older
markup language like html (e.g., .ce means center the next line), that
can handle much larger files efficiently than html and is generally
simpler, I find. You can do fonts, text and graphics and all the usual,
and the source files are pure ascii, like html files.
End of emotional rant
practical
-------------------------------
Howard Schwartz
-------------------------------
howardbschwartz "at" california.com
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