I have always a command prompt open running wget. Also, I always compile with command line. Plus I got the full GNUWin32 package, so I run scripts very often.

DOS is really helpful for me.

But he wasnt asking about that, Rey

Anyway, I dont use dos much anymore. I was using it for some gba->pc communication and basic linux on a gba a little while ago. I wired a UART in to a gba link cable, and had it hooked to my pc. Timing had to be perfect, so i needed a uni-task system that i could have absolute timing on. Dos was the answer (well, i didnt feel like finidng my dos 6.22 disks, so i used freedos, and made a custom live cd to use in my laptop)

Yeah, yeah, realized. I use DOS as an application platform, not as an OS.

DOS will live on forever in my heart. It cannot die!

Also, it's used quite a lot in various industrial systems.

I haven't actually used straight DOS in many years for anything practical.

I would say DOS is dead, in a sense that I could not see it advancing anywhere. It is still used for basic computing, but there is no more room for development.

I have an old machine which runs MS-DOS 6.22. I use it as my retro gaming platform and sometimes for programming. DOSBox is a great program, but some games are just too slow with it.

Too bad I don't have too much spare time at the moment, but sometimes it's just great to fire up X-Com or Pirates Gold and play all day.

DOS is very dead indeed. It has been for many years.

No, DOS is a horrendous sub-operating system that held personal computing back several years. If youreally need evidence then ask yourself why all of the DOS/Amiga golden era games (by which I'm thinking of Flashback, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, Wolfenstein 3d, Prince of Persia) were limited to VGA 320x200 resolution whereas at the same time the Mac ports were all at 640x400 or 640x480. Ask yourself why Creative Labs had a monopoly over the sound card market for so many reasons. Ask yourself why there were some games you ended up trying to configure for longer than you bothered playing.

DOS nostalgia is ill informed and not based upon any sort of realistic evaluation.

Agreed. DOS had no meaningful hardware driver support at any time (with the possible exception of those block drivers for volume access).

I think the Amiga was the first popular consumer PC but then I guess it depends how you define PC. I'm thinking more or less of a range of machines with a range of capabilities based around a common processor family. But not exactly that because I'd describe all Macs as a single family despite having moved to an entirely different processor architecture at one point.

But again you essentially agree my point. Creative Labs maintained a stronghold because DOS had no real hardware support for anything and so users had to buy things based on what registers they wanted to be where in memory rather than the more real world concerns of what sound quality they wanted, etc.

Well, apparently not since the more or less equivalently fast contemporaneous Macs can run the games with four or more times the number of pixels. In any case you're approaching the problem from the wrong angle. If games need all the speed they can get then it should be blatantly obvious that they should utilise all installed hardware to the fullest. DOS hindered this.

Yes, there is definitely no way that an OS that doesn't support hardware drivers could compound a hardware driver issue.

In any case your theory is off. DirectX is really only useful for Pentium machines. The 486 had the vesa local bus which ran at the same clock rate as the CPU and the 386 had both the MCA and EISA buses. You can argue chicken and egg all day if you like but the fact is that a limiting OS is going to limit development to at least some extent.

I was under the impression that it was possible to provide new code for running file access, character screen output and I will assume keyboard input, in line with MS DOS not originally being IBM PC specific but also being available for some other 8086 machines in a predictably CP/M fashion. However I understood that it was not possible to write anything recognisable as a driver for any other piece of hardware. So, for example, the VGA adapter doesn't have a driver but a BIOS extension allows several video modes to be set. At that point the VGA adapter starts occupying a certain region of memory but because DOS is real mode and doesn't do any meaningful memory management both the card and the program just have to assume they know where that region is.

That doesn't sound too bad, but then SVGA comes along. The amount of memory that needs to be displayed is about the same or larger than the total memory DOS knows about anyway (being a quickly thrown together real mode hack) so the only real solution is paging. This is an example of DOS introducing a performance hit rather than a benefit due to its archaic architecture.

Obviously there is no generic defined way for that sort of communication so all card vendors go and invent their own way. All programmers have to handle all the possibilities for a few years until the VESA BIOS extensions are agreed. For the overwhelming period in which they remain popular and useful they also remain stranded in real mode. As soon as programs switch to protected mode (which isn't using DOS but simply ejecting it from memory) they now have the overhead of a switch to real mode as well as a page request whenever they want to switch which region of the screen they are drawing to. This, again, is DOS inhibiting programs.

Conversely some genuinely quite good operating systems such as OS/2 (before it was graphical and Presentation Manager based) jump up that run much better on the same hardware. Original OS/2 is a 32bit protected mode console based operating system with a DLL framework that includes full DOS compatibility using virtual 8086 machines - running all DOS programs at the same speed as the same hardware did under DOS for at least the eight or so years until DOS extenders became the norm. Naturally these are ignored due in part to the usual Microsoft anti-competitive practices. And yet still people somehow see DOS as a good system.

Yes, I know that - hence the "overwhelming period" clause. To directly quote wikipedia on the subject:

I place reliance on the first thirty five words. I submit that a protected mode DOS extender is equivalent to a genuine protected mode operating system for these performance reasons.

One such BIOS call being "page in different video memory", i.e. the programmer had to do this five times a frame if the entire display was to be redrawn at the most common 640x480 8bpp resolution.