Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!pyramid!prls!philabs!ttidca!troeger
From: troeger@ttidca.TTI.COM (Jeff Troeger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Wanted: reports on Concurrent DOS
Message-ID: <2371@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Date: 22 Apr 88 14:35:12 GMT
References: <3371@tekgvs.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: troeger@ttidcb.tti.com (Jeff Troeger)
Distribution: na
Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica
Lines: 43

In article <3371@tekgvs.TEK.COM> keithe@tekgvs.UUCP (Keith Ericson) writes:
>
>But I wonder why (Digital Research's?) Concurrent DOS doesn't get
>more of an audience. Has anyone "out there" tried it? I'm tempted to
>get a copy and evaluate it unless I get some real seriou hate mail
>about it. Let me know what your experience has been...
>

My last job dealt with the porting of Concurrent DOS to a non-standard
Computer. (an 80186 that was non-IBM) and have quite a bit of experience
with Concurrent DOS . At that time, I was working with Version 4.0, and back
then it was mostly CP/M oriented. My job then was to make sure that the 
system worked with DRI tools, so I wasn't concerned too much with MS-DOS
compatibility. At that time, about 60% of DOS software worked without a
problem. 

Because of that experience, when it came time to try and find a what of
upgrading the processing capabilities of my AT, I thought DRI would have
a lot of their problems fixed with Version 6.0 XM. At first, it seemed like
they did.. The installation was easy, and I had no problems running initial
software...Then it came time for TSRs. I loaded Polytrons disk cache and
keyboost tsr, and those worked. I was expecting everything to work at this
point, but I started having problems when I could not get my serial printer
to work at all.. I tried every combination in the setup program to no avail.
I then tried set up the system to use my mouse (Logitech) and CDOS locked up
completely when trying to load the mouse TSRs. Well, end of story at this
point as the mouse was an important part of my hardware configuration so 
I ended up taking it back (Love those 14 day returns!) and am still looking
for other options..

In a nutshell, if you are just going straight DOS (no TSRs) then CDOS has
great possibilities (I think my printer problems were my fault, but you
can't get support unless you send in your registration card, and that 
would have voided my return policy) Their menu generation tools,
concurrent tasking, and print spooling features were definite pluses as
an alternate to MS-DOS. Make sure that you can run CDOS with using the
same environment you are used to before committing to it.


-- 
Jeff Troeger
Citicorp(+)TTI
3100 Ocean Park Blvd.   (213) 450-9111, ext. 3153
Santa Monica, CA  90405 {philabs,randvax,trwrb,csun}!ttidca!ttidcb!troeger