Mail Archives: opendos/2000/07/09/09:08:14
On Sat, 8 Jul 2000, Glenn McCorkle wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Jul 2000 19:07:09 -0400 (EDT), Paul O Bartlett wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> > On this list I read [etc.]
> > Figurativly speaking, is there any hope for a klutz like me, or am
> > I trapped in Windowdom?
>
> So, you'de like to run DOS???
> No problem. :-)
> You have W98 on that machine???
> You *have* MSDOS v7.something on that machine.
> [etc.]
Thanks very much for the response. However, I had a little more in
mind. I *did* manage to use MS-DOS somewhat effectively -- which is
part of my whole point -- and it seems that with MS-DOS 7 as a grudging
sop to the masses, I would not have that same effectiveness.
For example, I was able to use CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT somewhat
to my advantage. In the config, I always set up a ramdisk, even on my
old 5MB machine, so I could load very frequently used editors and
utilities in it for faster startup. COMAND.COM has always left
something to be desired, so I used SHELL= to used NDOS from the Norton
utilities (and to deal with lots of environment variables). I would
sometimes deal with languages other than English (doesn't everybody?),
so I used the MODE command and DISPLAY.SYS heavily to set up code pages
for other than 437. I have tried the old method I used from a command
prompt under W98, and it complains no-can-do (and, of course, the old
MODE from MS-DOS will not work). I used ANSI.SYS (actually, NANSI.SYS)
much to my advantage. I set up my own disk caching. And so on.
I call myself a klutz, but I *was* able to accomplish useful things
with DOS, and I have always thought that with a command line, I am more
in command. With the Windoozy interface, I seem not to be in control.
--
Paul mailto:bartlett AT smart DOT net
..........................................................
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
Keyserver (0xF383C8F9) or WWW for PGP public key
Home Page: http://www.smart.net/~bartlett
- Raw text -