
I collect manuals. I have so many of them, that I'm starting to wonder where on earth I'm supposed to put them all. Somewhere in the back of a closet, I keep all my manuals in three huge boxes, with manuals dating from the early '80s to just a few days ago when I bought a new mouse. However, none of them are as dear to my as my extensive, fully illustrated Dutch manuals for Windows 3.0, which accompanied my parents' first PC in 1990. An enormously detailed manual covering every aspect of Windows 3.0 - with special sleeves for the various floppy disks that held the Windows 3.0 operating system. I still have those original floppies, and they're still fully functional. Last week,
the era of Windows 3.x finally came to an end when Microsoft ceased to give out licenses for the operating system.
Member since:
2006-10-08
At least when applying some common criteria, DOS lacks means to install / delete / update programs (this is what the programs do have to on their own), means for diagnostics and maintenance, and program execution control (well, you could only run one program at a time - TSR programs aside).
Being impolite, you could say that DOS = FAT file system + COMMAND.COM CLI. Taking this into mind, it's obvious what DOS + "Windows" would be: FAT file system + COMMAND.COM CLI + GUI. :-)
That's a good statement. But finally, most things would depend on the user to do. Of couse, DOS and "Windows" belong to an era without Internet connection, so most considerations about today's OSs would not apply here.
Many years ago, I even build a video editing system running on top of DOS: three VCRs (two players, one recorder), a relay interface controlled via a DOS box (I think it was an 80286, no hard disk, just a floppy). So it wasn't that useless. :-)
Edited 2008-11-06 06:44 UTC