It is fascinating to read others' comments how DOS was bad.
In my opinion, it was amazing. Prior to graphical user interface, various DOS were the only interface in non-*nix world. Beating it up because it was not up to 2021 standards, is like beating a horse because it is not as fast as a car, does not have a blinking turn signal, and of course the suspension is too rough. I was delighted moving from writing things down in paper first to be able to do command line in DOS. Sure, it was not Unix, but was getting closer.
TSRs and various memory tricks demonstrates its flexibility at that time, despite hardware and firmware limitations. We wrote myriad of tiny programs, that often functioned like *nix programs, and became part of the users' ecosystem, albeit lost as soon as the user or programmer gave up.
> In my opinion, it was amazing. Prior to graphical user interface, various DOS were the only interface in non-*nix world.
Microsoft was late to the GUI party. Other platforms like Apple, Atari, Acorn, etc had proper GUI operating systems long before Microsoft did.
Also DOS wasn't even the only non-GUI outside of UNIX. Micro computers had BASIC (which was a lot more powerful than DOS in some ways) plus support for Pascal, LOGO, and other languages on ROM too. They could also run other operating systems such as GeOS, CP/M and others many wouldn't have heard of. There were also LISP machines, dumb terminals which would access "green screen" TUIs, and a whole slew of other niche systems out there.
DOS won because IBM-clones took over the world. DOS won because the hardware was cheap to clone not because the OS was the best of the era. Albeit it's fair to say once the momentum got behind IBM-clones DOS then continued to dominate due to people getting locked into MS-DOS applications. But DOS was never a particularly interesting operating system. If anything, CP/M was more interesting because it came several years before DOS, solved the hard problems that people took for granted with DOS, and ran on systems with far lower system memory (it was also the operating system that IBM PCs were originally intended to run -- but I'm sure you all know the conflicting stories behind that piece of history)
Thankfully here in Europe we had more variety. Commodore was still hugely popular but so was Acorn (BBC Basic was one of the best of the era) and Amstrad (Locomotive BASIC was loosely based on BBC Basic, so also pretty awesome). Sinclair machines (eg Spectrum) were also popular but that's one of the few machines of that era I didn't do any development on (played plenty of games but man are their keyboards annoying for any prolonged typing!) so cannot comment on how Sinclair BASIC performed against Microsoft BASIC.
Yes, AFAICT, many computers of the widely popular MSX standard used Basic made by Microsoft. Frankly, it was pretty nice, and had powerful extensions / special commands to make use of the hardware (graphics, sounds, networking).
For a one-user, one-task computer, you didn't need much of a proper OS anyway.
> Frankly, it was pretty nice, and had powerful extensions / special commands to make use of the hardware (graphics, sounds, networking).
That was standard across all the major dialects of BASIC in that era.
Personally I was less impressed with Microsoft BASIC compared to the European counterparts.
What I never understood was in the early 80s the UK had a real lead on the computer industry with Amstrad, Acorn and Sinclair all doing some really interesting stuff. But by the late 80s / early 90s all the UK systems had disappeared and replaced with Japanese consoles and American home computers. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Japanese nor American corporations -- it just feels like a real loss for the UK to go from world leaders to just another consumer.
I feel that the video didn't answer the question in its own title: why is it still a thing. People are “beating a horse” because it is a legitimate question why something slower than a car with no blinking turn signal and rough suspension is still a thing.
Why do people still ride horses? We don't need them, yet some people own and care for horses. Some people still drive Model T Fords, and other old things.
I still want a Gray Planer (a huge old obsolete machine tool) taking up a huge chunk of my garage, for zero practical reason. Though I'd settle for a benchtop shaper.
A lot of programs were written back in the days of MS-DOS that people got used to using, and they still work. You can't directly run MS-DOS programs anymore. You used to be able to right up to Windows 7, 32bit.
If you've got an old program that still does a job, you're used to it, why change anything?
There are programs that talk to hardware that run on MS-DOS, those programs and hardware represent a huge investment of time and effort, writing the program, building the hardware, and especially debugging the system. If you have those systems in production, you're going to do every single thing you can just to keep them running. You are certainly not going to risk any changes to a working system in the name of efficiency, especially if your business, or job, depends on it.
In many, many cases the original people, documentation, and decisions that went into the design are all unavailable, and all you have left is the artifact that works reliably if you maintain it and feed it proper inputs.
Museums and Archivists need to run old software to be able to retrieve old documents. For most cases, you could use DOSbox, or QEMU , but sometimes you need the old programs on the old hardware.
Finally, and likely most importantly, is nostalgia. For many of us our first real computer was an IBM compatible running MS-DOS. Because you can't buy DOS any more, FreeDOS does the job.
There was a fair amount of software written for DOS that never made the jump to Windows (or any other OS) and some combination of hasn't been economically viable to redevelop and/or people just really liked the way the DOS app worked.
One common use case was control/monitoring software for some specialized piece of external hardware such as test/measurement equipment, security, HVAC etc. Much of this has modern substitutes available on current platforms, but it requires replacing the hardware as well as the software. Given that people paid 5+ figures for this stuff back in the day and if it still works, might as well keep using it until the wheels come off.
Xenix dev tools can produce x86 real mode objects. Some dev kits even have the full linker and libraries.
The original Microsoft C for the 386 was a Xenix product although the OS/2 1632 cross compiler was certainly around in 1991 when everything was going the way of Windows NT.
The original 1991 NT pre-release could even make OS/2 2.0 32bit OMF objects.
In my opinion, it was amazing. Prior to graphical user interface, various DOS were the only interface in non-*nix world. Beating it up because it was not up to 2021 standards, is like beating a horse because it is not as fast as a car, does not have a blinking turn signal, and of course the suspension is too rough. I was delighted moving from writing things down in paper first to be able to do command line in DOS. Sure, it was not Unix, but was getting closer.
TSRs and various memory tricks demonstrates its flexibility at that time, despite hardware and firmware limitations. We wrote myriad of tiny programs, that often functioned like *nix programs, and became part of the users' ecosystem, albeit lost as soon as the user or programmer gave up.
Yes, I am going to be counter argumentative. :)