Did DOS ever crash?

[Nothinman]

Don't forget that cool worm game that came with Qbasic.

nibbles.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: kamper

Originally posted by: Nothinman
All of the time, I don't believe it had any memory protection so it was trivial for an app to overwrite memory it didn't own and take the whole system down. And it was a single-tasking environment so one app could easily spin in a loop and use all of the CPU making it look like the box had locked up.

Sounds like a hoot. Wish I was a programmer back in those days 😛

Oh yea, it was a real joy. Now the standard cycle is edit->compile->test repeat Working on DOS/WIN3.1/WIN95/WIN98 it was often edit->compile->test->reboot repeat

And the various joys of himem, and just general instability even if there was nothing wrong with your code.

That's what initially drove me to linux - nothing like having your box crash 2.5 days into a 3 day run. I came for the stability, I stayed for the features.

 

[Bluestealth]

Originally posted by: Dravic

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
err well i just remembered the real nightmare of dos. remember all that hi mem stuff? even if you had 8mb or whatever of ram and that was technically enough for the game if u didn't clear enough of the first 640k u couldn't run the game. so u'd have to create special boot discs where you limit loading drivers or whatever and tried to shove everything u could into high mem region or whatever. 1mb to play with no matter how much ram u had physically. it was unfun.

still remember trying to free up 610k for privateer the space sim...

it needed 610k free, just crazy...


LOAD HIGH DAMN YOU.... LOAD HIGH

THAT GAME, I ended up using some very strange memory mappings and some other fun stuff it to get it working, and then it didn't support sound fully GRRRRR

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Don't forget that cool worm game that came with Qbasic.

nibbles.

nibbles?

 

[lxskllr]

Awesome, thanks for the link 🙂 That games a lot of fun for being as simple as it is :thumbsup:

 

[Markbnj]

Depends on what you mean by DOS crashing. DOS itself was pretty small and stable, primarily because there was so little real functionality. But because the processor ran in real mode, and the whole system was one big address space (segmented too!), any bit of rogue software could trash everything.

And _that_ happened quite frequently 🙂.