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From: jdb@reef.cis.ufl.edu (Brian K. W. Hook)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: DOS 5.0 soon?
Message-ID: <26492@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU>
Date: 25 Jan 91 13:59:42 GMT
References: <83334@unix.cis.pitt.edu>
Sender: news@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU
Organization: UF CIS Dept.
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In article <83334@unix.cis.pitt.edu> kwgst@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Filip Gieszczykiewicz) writes:
>
>	Greetings. I'm shopping for a 386 at the moment. How long
>	do I have to wait for this Dos 5.0. I have been told that
>	4.01 "sucks beans" and I should stick to 3.3.
>
>	So, what's the story?
>
>	Take care.

Well, to sum up the DOS saga as I know it, here goes....

Until the release of DOS 4.00 in 1989(?) the current standard, and a happy
one at that, had been DOS 3.31.  However, DOS 4.00 addressed certain 
problems that had been quite obvious with DOS 3.31, mostly that of a 
lack of an installation program, lack of a friendly "DOS Shell", and
the inability to support hard drive partitions greater than 32MB.  Well,
what really happened was this:

IBM PC-DOS 4.00 was released and was found to be excessively buggy.  Many
programs, including Norton Utilities, would just not work with DOS 4.00.
Also, DOS 4.00 consumed about 15K (not exactly sure) more of ye olde
valuable memory under 640K.  This was not making many people happy.  As
a matter of fact, I have heard that in 1990 DOS 3.31 was STILL outselling
DOS 4.01.  Anyway....DOS 4.00 was soon upgraded by Microsoft to DOS 4.01
in an attempt to kill the bugs.  This was only partially effective.  So,
in a piece by piece fashion:

DOS Shell:  Most people who have used the DOS 4.01 shell REALLY disklike it
and just get something like XTree or PCTools or Norton Commander.  IT is
highly unintuitive and difficult to use.  Especially when you want to
just type COPY C:\DOS\*.TXT \UTIL\DOC and have to use that annoying shell.

Installation:  The install program was not only difficult to use, it 
prevented "old-timers" from just easily booting a disk, doing a FORMAT
C:/S, and COPY A:*.* C:\DOS to get DOS on a new hard drive...instead
of the old two disks with DOS 3.31, you have SELECT, INSTALL, OPERATING
DISKS 1-3, DOSSHELL, and I believe one more.  Also, the install program
puts thinks like FCBS and FASTOPEN which most people don't use.  As 
a matter of fact, FASTOPEN is downright dangerous when used with something
like PC TOOLS compress or Norton Speed Disk, since the file pointers
aren't updated when the files are moved.

Big Hard Drive Partitions:  Most people LIKED partitions at the times,
since it was an easier way to keep track of information.  However, 
32MB has become a severe limitation.  Most of us just used ONTRACK Disk
Manager to get around the 32MB limit.  The problem with the DOS 4.01
was that you had severe incompatibilities with certain programs (i.e.
SpinRite, Optune, Norton Utils, Mace Utils, et. al.) that couldn't
cope with the new FAT and partition structure.  Luckily, most of the
problems disappeared  as new versions of software were released.

Memory Overhead:  The added memory of DOS 4.01 prevented many programs
from even working, including Ventura Publisher and a couple of games.  This
was not good, with the RAM cram we have to suffer through right now
anyway.


To sum:  DOS 4.01 does, in fact, "suck beans".  I personal recommendation
is to use COMPAQ DOS 3.31, which supports hard drive partitions greater
than 32MB and is quite efficient.

As for DOS 5.0, well, it is supposed to include many utilities by Central
Point Software, including UnErase, UnFormat, etc.  Also, it is supposed
to load TSRs, drivers, etc,. into high memory, allow rudimentary task
switching, have command line editing and history, and basically do
everything that DOS 4.01 was SUPPOSED to do.  It has been undergoing
heavy beta testing so that a fiasco like what happened last time doesn't
happen again.

Hope this helps,

Brian