I have used DOS, then Windows 3.11 (incl WfW), Win 95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT3.51, NT4, Win 2K, Win XP and expect to have to use Server 2K3. The thing I recall liking the most about DOS - Win98 was the sense of fun: I enjoyed custom building and autoexec.bat file or tweaking win.ini just to get a game to run. Does that sound a bit geeky? It probably does. Meh.

The thing I liked most about those OSes was that you could make them do something outside of what you were supposed to (let's leave aside that maybe you were supposed to tweak it) and the enjoyment of getting something to run when you had read that you couldn't made it, for me, a worthwhile past time. Let's put aside that, up until they wanted to do the same thing, people would look askance at you when you mentioned this.

It was a time when all sorts of things seemed possible and Windows was only just being slammed for being a touch bloated. These were the days when everything came on floppies and boxes of any software were the size of a Victorian bible.

It strikes me that we, as Linux users, are where Windows was back then. Now, before you flame me with your scary l33t-5p34k, let me elaborate. We are at the point now that we were at then in this respect: you don't want a gui, that's fine, don't have one or just have one if you want one; your software says "Windows" or "Mac" only - rubbish, tweak a few files, grab a download and you're flying!

It seems to me that Windows (and to a lesser extent Macs) has taken away the one thing that made them such good systems to use - the tweakability. Sure you can change your screen colours, your background, the plastic look of the desktop, but you can't hand craft files to make it do wierd things, you can't run things on it that weren't written for it.

So, as a discussion point, I submit that because of the above things Linux is where Windows 3.11 was a number of years ago. Discuss.

*Note: please please please don't give me your "Linux is better because..." or "Windows is better because..." - we have the perfectly good "Y Windows is better than Linux" thread in this forum. And anyway, I'm afraid that argument is boring. This is a thread to celebrate the fact that we are able to do what we want to with our OS in the same way we could with 3.11.

And I have just discovered the new, official rules of the whole internet written in crayon on the back of a cereal box which say that anyone hijacking this thread or trying to turn it into a "we hate Windows, lol" style thread, will get chloroformed! It's the law. You have been warned!

to be be honest, windows 3.11 networking edition is the best one they've given us, it's the most stable. heh :P
linux is a lot better than the stuff M$ gave us when windows was young!

its true to an extent.

but linux now is obviously much more mature, and windows was never opensource. sure, SOME things could be done on it, but in linux EVERYTHING can be done.

Amen!

XavierP; thank you for your insight of days gone-by (but they were good) that is where your basis of knowledge comes from aha! bad advise i recieved then w95
(stay away from dos) did and dreaded to use it. terrible advice regret i did. thank to linux am learning oh joy oh joy!

You see, that's what I'm on about! We are now, to coin a phrase, Knowledge Users. We know, again, what goes on when a program runs, we know that we can either double click an icon or we can type a command. That's why Windows 3.11 was good and why Linux just rocks.

Equally, as then, those who just don't want to know can stay in the gui and the rest of us can jump between gui and command line to our hearts' content.

XavierP; Amen to that. you ROCK u da man! thank you for all the encouragement. u lead i`ll follow.

i was 6 when i used win 3.1, so i didnt use DOS much. before that though, i could do basic things in DOS, i managed to play doom and a game with a treehouse, but that was about it. by the time i got to win 95 and 98, i didnt use DOS at all, except when executing DOS games that ran in a cmd window. in win ME, i was too busy ctrl+alt+dlt'ing to do much of anything, and with win NT, they killed off the commandline entirely.

i havent figured out how to use imwheel compeltly yet, but in windows, there is no way you can get a mouse working without installing logi-bloatcrap. or to get a printer working without installing hp's key stroke logger/print drivers.

sure, its a lot easier the windows way, but doing it yourself is so much better in the end.

I just hope that Linux will stay this way into the future. I don't care if the desktops get more bloated and "user friendly", as long as there are still the manual way of doing things, using the command line.

I think the GUIs like Mandrake Control Center are a good idea, as long as they are just frontends for the configuration files we all know and love It will be a sad day when these frontends create config files that are not editable by hand.

--Ian

I liked the fact that in the old days, you could switch to the lovely read-mode, full black screen C:\> prompt and play your favourite games. Believe it or not, I think DOS was a great platform for the games of those times. Sure, getting your sound card to work was a bit of a problem, but in those days hardware compatibility was still in the early stages for all of us including Linux.

I still use Windows 98 SE because of this reason. I want my DOS purely for playing those memorable games which I still think are great. These days you have great graphics and so on, but the charm of old games will never die out. In fact, with age, they will probably attain antique status.

Why did Microsoft remove DOS mode? I think they claimed stability and improved system performance as the reasons (insert big laugh here). But really, what have they achieved by taking away the real mode DOS? Is Win XP faster than Win 98 SE with the same system specs? In fact, XP is far more bloated and slower than Win 98.

I think Microsoft would do well to restore the good old command line DOS. Probably they can upgrade the 16-bit architecture and all that, but I still want a terminal mode (not necessarily the DOS box) outside of the GUI environment.

yes, those DOS games were the best ... i installed the linux ports of doom, wolfeinstien (the older dos one), and raise of the triad ... seems quake is only available in binary ... then theres duke3d thats fun ...

and then the non GUI games (like the wonderful nethack)

and yes, i kinda remember windows 3.11 ( well, i think that was it ... i never remember then name, but the game were compatible with win95 so ill just assume its window 3.1* ) ... i hated when you closed a window (the ones with program names in it) i couldn't get it back .. but when i upgraded to win95 it lost a lot of programs and features i liked ... and it just went downhill from there

harishankar; ah bg needs user to become dependent on w that $ drive. but had the old timers discontent & they fled in linux. pure & simple. the joy of linux o joy o joy!

IMHO, DOS never was up to what bash is. Some tweaking and "batching" was possible, but nowhere near what I can do with bash.

Yves.

Who is comparing DOS and bash here? The two are totally different and nobody claimed that DOS is a powerful OS or anything

Yes I know. I just wanted to point out, that "good old" Windows 3+DOS, with .bat files and all, wasn't what Linux is today.

Yves.