Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 18:07:11 +1200 From: physmsa AT cantua DOT canterbury DOT ac DOT nz (Mr M S Aitchison) Subject: Re: why? and about current attempts to make OpenDOS WIN'95 compatible To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Message-id: <199707140607.SAA24286@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz> Precedence: bulk Two slightly similar messages... > What could there possibly be to gain from running win95 from > Opendos instead of whatever version of DOS MS using to load > '95? I'm missing the point here somewhere - if there is one. I'm not sure if the aim was to run win95 from the Opendos command prompt or to get the OpenDOS version of command.com when you need a DOS window within Win95. Either way could be useful to some people (I particulary like the option of using bits of OpenDOS and 4DOS and FreeDOS to upgrade Win95 to something a little more useful). The OpenDOS command.com has little features that I really cannot live without any more, although no one of them is exactly crucial to me. > I think the attempt to attain simple "WIN95 compatibility" for OpenDOS is > a wrong way because of: Novell DOS had sat idle for a long time, eroding the lead the operating system had over MS, so there are features that many people *expect* a DOS to have that had to be added pretty darned quick. This hasn't meant OpenDOS moving into the bloated software class - it retains the good features of DOS, including the ability to run on miserly hardware. And I expect that implementing features like long filenames the buggy MS way is only part of a short-term emergency operation; better things are likely in OpenDOS later. It is open enough to not at all depend on what Caldera choose to do with it. There are some things OpenDOS *needs* to have simply to be thought of as a viable, modern operating system, even if you and I don't need to use such features ourselves. Being able to read/write diskettes with long filenames is important; greater compatibility with Win95 (so you can use the OpenDOS version of command.com) is nice for me, but I expect is only a side-effect of the foundation work needed to allow better things to be built on OpenDOS. > 1) Nobody can buy WINDOWS 4 without M$-DOS 7; But people buy add-ons for Windows to make it work better. Many home users with children who access their computer would like security as much as business users; there are better facilities in some commands (e.g. FC, TYPE); and some people would like to be able to boot into DOS mode to get the maximum RAM possible (and OpenDOS beats MSDOS 7 there). > 2) The best features of OpenDOS (TASKMGR, UNDELETE) are useless in WINDOWS.. True. Undelete *could* be made to work. But we're still talking about old utilities; I guess Caldera want to get even better apps out for OpenDOS, and 3rd-party developers would like a platform which isn't likely to be changed at Bill's whim. To be able to build such apps onto the OpenDOS platform it first needs to be modernised. > 3) This way cannot solve the main problem of the present-day...[bloatware].. I think OpenDOS isn't going the bloatware way. I must admit, it was one of my early fears, but look at LONGNAME.EXE - it takes 13kB of RAM, runs on ye olde and ancient PC's, etc. I'm happy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Aitchison, Physics & Astronomy \_ Phone : +64 3 3642-947 a.h. 3371-225 University of Canterbury, (/' Callsign: ZL3TQE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------