Did DOS ever crash?

[Maximilian]

I cant remember it crashing, i had 6.22 or somthing along those lines. Did DOS ever crash like any of the DOS based windows varients?

 

[Nothinman]

All of the time, I don't believe it had any memory protection so it was trivial for an app to overwrite memory it didn't own and take the whole system down. And it was a single-tasking environment so one app could easily spin in a loop and use all of the CPU making it look like the box had locked up.

 

[keeleysam]

Oh God yes.

Infinitely more than anything NT.

 

[Maximilian]

Interesting. Could it be crashed just by typing somthing into the command prompt? Somthing that isnt the name of an app? I remember trying but it would always give me the "bad command or file name" crap.

On a related note, could DOS actually do anything on its own? Like windows can, as it can paint, write in wordpad, make movies? play music.

 

[keeleysam]

Originally posted by: Soviet
Interesting. Could it be crashed just by typing somthing into the command prompt? Somthing that isnt the name of an app? I remember trying but it would always give me the "bad command or file name" crap.

On a related note, could DOS actually do anything on its own? Like windows can, as it can paint, write in wordpad, make movies? play music.

Paint, WordPad, and WMP aren't part of the OS... they are bundled programs.

 

[Nothinman]

Interesting. Could it be crashed just by typing somthing into the command prompt? Somthing that isnt the name of an app? I remember trying but it would always give me the "bad command or file name" crap.

It wasn't quite that simple to do. Although I wouldn't be surprised if there buffer overflows in the command line interpreter, for instance if you typed a few thousand characters into the cli on an older NetWare box it would cause the server to abend.

 

[Maximilian]

Originally posted by: keeleysam

Originally posted by: Soviet
Interesting. Could it be crashed just by typing somthing into the command prompt? Somthing that isnt the name of an app? I remember trying but it would always give me the "bad command or file name" crap.

On a related note, could DOS actually do anything on its own? Like windows can, as it can paint, write in wordpad, make movies? play music.

Paint, WordPad, and WMP aren't part of the OS... they are bundled programs.

Yea they came with the OS, you dont need to install anything else to paint, it comes with the OS, did DOS not have anything that came with it??

 

[JonnyBlaze]

Originally posted by: Soviet

Originally posted by: keeleysam

Originally posted by: Soviet
Interesting. Could it be crashed just by typing somthing into the command prompt? Somthing that isnt the name of an app? I remember trying but it would always give me the "bad command or file name" crap.

On a related note, could DOS actually do anything on its own? Like windows can, as it can paint, write in wordpad, make movies? play music.

Paint, WordPad, and WMP aren't part of the OS... they are bundled programs.

Yea they came with the OS, you dont need to install anything else to paint, it comes with the OS, did DOS not have anything that came with it??

yes. it came with basic, edit and ummm, i think thats about it.

 

[Cdeck]

ms dos,lol. ctrl-alt-del and format c: were the most common functions.

 

[Crusty]

Originally posted by: Cdeck
ms dos,lol. ctrl-alt-del and format c: were the most common functions.

Umm.... not really.

 

[smack Down]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
All of the time, I don't believe it had any memory protection so it was trivial for an app to overwrite memory it didn't own and take the whole system down. And it was a single-tasking environment so one app could easily spin in a loop and use all of the CPU making it look like the box had locked up.

But that isn't really DOS crashing that is the application that is running crashing.

 

[Nothinman]

But that isn't really DOS crashing that is the application that is running crashing.

So? The effect is still the same and it's the job of the OS to protect itself and other processes from other processes.

 

[0roo0roo]

well, when a program crashed u couldn't hope to end task. u hit the reset button

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
All of the time, I don't believe it had any memory protection so it was trivial for an app to overwrite memory it didn't own and take the whole system down. And it was a single-tasking environment so one app could easily spin in a loop and use all of the CPU making it look like the box had locked up.

Sounds like a hoot. Wish I was a programmer back in those days

 

[0roo0roo]

err well i just remembered the real nightmare of dos. remember all that hi mem stuff? even if you had 8mb or whatever of ram and that was technically enough for the game if u didn't clear enough of the first 640k u couldn't run the game. so u'd have to create special boot discs where you limit loading drivers or whatever and tried to shove everything u could into high mem region or whatever. 1mb to play with no matter how much ram u had physically. it was unfun.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
err well i just remembered the real nightmare of dos. remember all that hi mem stuff? even if you had 8mb or whatever of ram and that was technically enough for the game if u didn't clear enough of the first 640k u couldn't run the game. so u'd have to create special boot discs where you limit loading drivers or whatever and tried to shove everything u could into high mem region or whatever. 1mb to play with no matter how much ram u had physically. it was unfun.

I actually enjoyed tweaking my config.sys and autoexec.bat files to make DOS games run.

It was very rewarding to finally make a blasted game run with sound after 1 whole day of tweaks.

I remember when I finally reached the 620k mark and Master of Magic ran with sound. It made me feel h4xXx0rz

 

[spike spiegal]

Back in the mid 90's the graphics shop I was at used this photo editing program that ran native on DOS, and did pretty much everything Photoshop 4 did. We all had 128meg of RAM, which was a lot at the time, ran true color graphics, printed to film recorders and drum scanners, yadda, yadda, yadda. Regretfully NT 3.51 was poorly marketed even though it was lightyears superior to anything a Mac could do at the time and far more stable.

My understanding of such DOS environments was that it was easy to write a driver, but harder to write a driver than got along with everything else. The advantage was no OS over-head given that NT 3.51 or Win95 at the time would suck up 24-32meg of RAM, which was precious given the cost of the stuff. Win3.1 was a joke unless you only needed to run Excel and Winword. Actually Win3.1 was tolerable *if* you ran Norton desktop on top of it.

I had a lot of friends running rather large BBS's off of DOS and rarely if ever had to reboot the machines, although a lot of those applications just used DOS as an initial boot environment and then loaded their own environment above 1meg into some emulation. I knew a guy who had 64modems plugged into a BBS running off a 286x, and text based chat sessions and other stuff was real time - even with all lines in use.

Provided you were only running one app in DOS at a time, it could be pretty tough to take down. It's when autoexec.bat's becaomes three pages long and you needed half a dozen TSR's loaded to support all those gadgets people started to buy.

Yes, net gaming was possible then to. I had a lab full of 486's running Doom2 all linked with IPX, and the only difference with today's games was resolution.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: spike spiegal

Yes, net gaming was possible then to. I had a lab full of 486's running Doom2 all linked with IPX, and the only difference with today's games was resolution.

Ah yes.....back in high school programming classes, the teacher would let the "nerds" or whatever we'd be best described as, play Duke Nukem 3d on our 486 systems, which even then were ancient, among the Pentium II's that were becoming standard. It actually ran pretty smoothly. Very low res for sure, but very little lag. Aah, good times. Rocket launchers, laser trip bombs, all kinds of fun stuff.

 

[Nothinman]

Yes, net gaming was possible then to. I had a lab full of 486's running Doom2 all linked with IPX, and the only difference with today's games was resolution.

Not exactly the only difference. Since you're using IPX you were limited to playing with people on the same local network and generally the games were limited to 4 or 8 people. And getting Doom to run in DOS with the network stuff loaded was a lot more work.

 

[0roo0roo]

well it wasn't just ipx. it was dialup. first rts multiplayer that worked half decent was warcraft. course this took some work still. doom 2 cooperative was ok, doom2 over bbs's for 4 player was crazy!! but ping was also crazy. setting it up so it would actually connect was always pretty hard. and that was the good way. tcpip was outa the question..so laggy

 

[biostud]

you could easily crash dos. Just rename an non executable file to either .com .bat or .exe and try to run it.

Ah the fun days of tweaking your system to the last drop of juice.

 

[Dravic]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
err well i just remembered the real nightmare of dos. remember all that hi mem stuff? even if you had 8mb or whatever of ram and that was technically enough for the game if u didn't clear enough of the first 640k u couldn't run the game. so u'd have to create special boot discs where you limit loading drivers or whatever and tried to shove everything u could into high mem region or whatever. 1mb to play with no matter how much ram u had physically. it was unfun.

still remember trying to free up 610k for privateer the space sim...

it needed 610k free, just crazy...


LOAD HIGH DAMN YOU.... LOAD HIGH

 

[Smilin]

Yeah, unload a pair of TSRs in the wrong order. haha.

 

[Shawn]

sure, but it booted back up so fast it wasn't even a big deal.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: JonnyBlaze

Originally posted by: Soviet

Originally posted by: keeleysam

Originally posted by: Soviet
Interesting. Could it be crashed just by typing somthing into the command prompt? Somthing that isnt the name of an app? I remember trying but it would always give me the "bad command or file name" crap.

On a related note, could DOS actually do anything on its own? Like windows can, as it can paint, write in wordpad, make movies? play music.

Paint, WordPad, and WMP aren't part of the OS... they are bundled programs.

Yea they came with the OS, you dont need to install anything else to paint, it comes with the OS, did DOS not have anything that came with it??

yes. it came with basic, edit and ummm, i think thats about it.

Don't forget that cool worm game that came with Qbasic.