On 03/04/2013 09:07 PM, William Ivanski wrote:
On 04-03-2013 22:39, Yaro Kasear wrote:
When (U)EFI completely replaces BIOS THEN DOS will be completely
dead. Right now it's just a horribly obsolete OS used by people
afraid of kernels or enterprises that refuse to upgrade some of
their infrastructure.
It's also used by people who, many years ago, paid for a vital system
which runs on DOS, and nowadays can't pay for a better modern system
Well, it's also used, occasionally, by people who have software the
equivalent of which does not exist on a modern system.
In addition to programs that were specifically written by a user to
solve some problem, there are some commercial programs that have no
modern equivalent. One that comes immediately to mind is Eureka, which
I think was sold by Borland. Eureka will solve math problems using
standard keyboard notation, ala BASIC, which to my mind is much easier
to deal with than something like MathCad. If you've ever tried to
enter an equation into MathCad, without months of previous experience,
you'll know exactly what I mean. I have a DosBox routine installed
specifically to run Eureka, which fortunately is now in the public
domain. (I once had the non-free floppy disks, but even if I could
find them,
they are probably unreadable by this time. Or they were 5¼", which
amounts to the same thing.)
Another program, which I used until I retired in 2002 was EEsof's
Touchstone. An extremely expensive RF cad program, it worked with netlist
inputs. When HP bought the company, they imposed their graphical
interface, which would have worked really nicely if you had a screen
about 4 feet by 5 feet to draw your circuit on! I suppose a 30" screen
would have worked, but nobody had one in those days. What you could
do in two typed pages of netlist would fit nicely on a D- or E-sized
drawing, graphically. Sure, you sketched it out on several pieces of
paper
first by hand, but you didn't put in 4 or 5 parameters for every last
component like HP required. There is no modern equivalent that I know
of,
and the old program is not available at any price. This is progress?
(I'm only kidding about that last remark--I wouldn't give up my GUI,
but I could wish that some of the old smarts still existed. If you
think that
the modern graphical approach is so great, try taking pictures
outdoors with one of those nice 2" x 3" LCD displays. Give me an
eye-level
viewfinder any day!)
--doug