 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group MS DOS 5.00 George Skarbek gskarbek@melbpc.org.au |
 |
Last month's meeting was by far the largest ever over 500 people and nearly 100 having to stand. The reason for this huge turnout was, I believe, that Microsoft's demonstration of DOS 5.00.
Unfortunately their demonstration was the poorest demo of any commercial demonstrations that I have seen in all my years at these meetings. By contrast, the demonstration by Borland who showed Quattro Pro 3.0 was excellent.
The first Microsoft speaker gave a reasonable overview of DOS 5.00 but his slides used such small writing that only the first few rows would have been able to read them.
The second presenter was the technical expert who demonstrated DOS on his laptop, whose output was projected on to the screen. All that was shown by him was the Dosshell, use of an environment variable which he got wrong and then he typed "dir /p" and "dir /w" to show that directory names are shown in square brackets, and that was all!
I have used a beta version of DOS 5.00 for several months and think that DOS 5 is a great product. For the demonstration typing "dir /p" shows nothing and I believe that "dir /?" would have been far more informative as shown below.
|
|
This shows that all commands have help, existing commands have been improved, and the
dir command is useful at last. You can now see for example, all read-only files on your hard disk sorted by size. (The total space taken up by these files is also shown.)
That there are many new commands was not mentioned or shown by Microsoft As the first speaker talked about memory management I expected that mem would be typed as this command shows the memory available. My typical rnem output is shown
below.
|
|
To achieve so much available memory I would have expected Microsoft to show typical config.sys and autoexec.bat files and briefly comment about the extra commands. My typical files are shown below.
|
|
 |
The new commands are shown in capitals and are responsible for leaving 627136 byte of free
memory on a 386 computer, after loading DOS, ansi.sys, ramdrives, PC-CACHE, CED and a mouse driver. (Without additional memory DOS 5.00 does not give much improvement, I did not try it on an
XT)
The above few commands would have given the members a better feel of what DOS 5.00 can do. Several members mentioned to me after the meeting that they felt ]et down and had no feel of what the new DOS can do. One felt it was his fault because he could not understand what was demonstrated. It was not his fault, it was
Microsoft's.
The majority of the demonstration time available was taken up showing the Dosshell file manager. It may be an improvement over DOS 4 but I own Xtree which is far superior and have deleted their Dosshell program from my disk.
Recently I purchased a computer with DR DOS 5 for a friend. It has most of the features of the Microsoft product, including the memory management. I have not been able to compare their relative performances but subjectively I believe there is little difference. For owners of DR DOS 5 I believe it is not worth changing to Microsoft DOS. 5.
Reprinted from the July 1991 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
