Baslinux mailing list

[Day Brown <daybrown AT hypertech.net>]

"Krzysztof A. Suchecki" wrote:

> keesan2 AT cyberspace.org wrote:
>
> > Regarding DOS vs Linux, I don't like the multiuser stuff either,
>
> You mean consoles you switch with ALt+Fx?
> I wish I had at least two consoles when I do FreeDOS.
> It's really handy.

TASKMAX w/ DRDOS 7.03 will give you three terminals. I've used one to
compose assy with and a second to test run, which might crash the
'terminal', but ctrl-esc brings me right back to the other dos desktop.
Not too bad.

Among the comparisons between DOS & LINUX which I see all the time, is the
idea of multitasking, which I see is being used by webmasters to embed
spam on my desktop. Back in the days when the hardware was slow, it made a
lotta sense to be able to park one graphic app and run a fax in the
background while the user edited ascii in the foreground task. But fax
machines are so cheap now, I dont bother with fax software any more. I am
not using my PC to monitor any outside process that needs control. And
with the faster platforms, I can change from the dos prompt to a NEOPAINT
gif as fast as I can point and click to get xwin to bring the same image
and designer up.

I could setup multitasking with dos, but I dont *bother* because the real
mode task switching with almost all dos programs are under 200k, not meg,
and come up as fast as the video can display them. Presumably, a
knowledgeable BL user could find and use and store just the fastest apps
which he actually needs rather than using whatever the distro programmers
selected, which tends to have the most appealing eye candy.

Much of the user interface reminds me of the 56 DeSoto dashboard; lots of
chrome, lotsa buttons. Lotsa confusion. Looked just great on TV. People
said that the new Mopar pushbutton tramsmission would completely replace
the demand for the clutch and stick shift.

But then, the advertising agents and media people all lived in California.
They didnt know that I'd blow a Mopar apart trying to 'rock' my back end
out of a Minnesota snowbank. In their world, if you had trouble, you
called a tow truck, which was only half a mile down the freeway, but in
mine, it was 15 miles of blizzard to town, and no phone.

Programmers are still out on the west coast, and they still dont get it.
The eye candy which looks so good in the TV ads aint that hot in the real
world which is rapidly filling up with spam. Trying to analyze the lack of
intellectual content in a graphic image is hopeless, but spam blockers can
be created that can cope to some extent with ascii.

People will be *driven* back to the CLI just to reduce the clutter. But
here again, Linux fans miss the comparison to the dos menu system, which
is *not* limited to the command line that bash is spozed to be so superior
to. There is nothing besides MC which comes close to the dos file manager,
DW.EXE... most of the dos apps still around do not present the user with
monochrome, but like MC use the color scrollbar.  Type a letter with DW,
and it scrolls down to the file that begins with it. Or use your mouse to
zip down a list. Alt-E sorts by extension. Alt-S by size, Alt-D by date,
alt-L, the default, by name.

Dos text editors began with color bars with the CGA; by the time
DEXTER.EXE came out, the dashboard had evolved to meet the real needs of
typists & authors. I dunno why all the Linux terminal mode text editors
I've seen are all monochrome; I dunno why they didnt have color scrollbar
pulldowns with contextual help rather than having to use  man info and
page thru hundreds of lines.

It couldda been done in Linux, but the rush to the GUI missed it. And yes,
the CLI can be a lot faster and more powerful, but ANSI color menus in 50x
80 would be a lot easier for newbies to pick up on, but also have a lot
more *content* and contextual clues with scrollbar pulldowns. If you want
buttons and sliders you can do that too, a kind of training wheel system.
error messages with a red background,configuration changes invert the
usual color.  In the documentation, the keys which the user is expected to
type after a prompt are in red.  Instructions have been to gurus and
sysads who knew the [comventions] of the <brackets | options>; newbies
need a better clue. Color can do that, the Linux CLI is more boring and
limited than it needs to be.

This is *not* dos vs linux.  This is more about the 'not invented here'
syndrome; there have been lots of dos tools to supply Linux functionality
like LTOOLS.  There are likewise lots of dos tools with functionality that
would help the Linux newbie. But from the comments I've seen from Linux
developers, they dont really have much experience with dos, so they dont
know. As I see so often with the idea that you cannot multitask in dos. If
any of them had actually bothered to install DRDOS 7, they would see the
'multitasking' option in the setup process.

With drives the size they now are, there is plenty of room for both dos
and BL on the same desktop. We dont havta vote for which is best, but use
whichever works at the time to do what we need.