I grew up on 68k Macs so DOS was never something I thought much about aside from the occasional boot disk to run some firmware procedure later on when later Windows was well established.

Then later from a retrocomputing standpoint, I've come to see it is pretty fascinating:

1) The sheer volume of commercial software.. which is readily available on winworld, vetusware, and archive.org. A lot of it with sometimes awesome character-mode UIs (Borland's early IDEs are really spectacular, Lotus 1-2-3, and WordPerfect are still taken seriously by some users).

2) The memory model is quixotic and an interesting homage to the chaotic evolution of x86 that most later operating systems elide by requiring a 386. The 286 and 386 have drastically different protection schemes. EMS and XMS. The eventual DOS extenders and standards like VCPI, DPMI. It's honestly a mess but somehow interesting to see how people solved difficult problems.

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keyle 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

If anything, a lot of the modern developer experience has suffered compared to the early Borland IDEs. One would easily say we regressed.

They were focused, immediate and effective.

If anything today you'd miss the code navigation features (go to definition, go back, go forward), and of course LSP is actually very useful and once you don't have it, it hurts (instant errors, ease of refactoring...)

Give me something like the Borland IDEs (FAST!) and some of the modern features (they can be slower, they're only as fast as the LSP server implementation anyway) and I'm there!

I did a proof of concept quickly, mostly while learning to write code editors, but I have not gotten it to a point of being useful [1]

[1] https://imgur.com/a/BexhJ12

	▲	pjmlp 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We just have to look at the praise Go gets for its compilation speed, versus coding Turbo Pascal and Turbo Basic in a 10 Mhz PC with 640 KB.

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zozbot234 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The Free Pascal software distribution includes a FLOSS look-alike of Borland's character-mode IDE for Pascal. If you can track down RHIDE, that's a similar look-alike IDE that runs in MS-DOS (it does require 386+ since it uses a DOS extender) and compiles C/C++ using gcc. (One version of it is distributed as part of the FreeDOS "development" packages.) It would be nice to recreate a broadly similar look and featureset starting from a modern text-mode editor such as the newly released MS-EDIT, aiming for modern IDE infrastructure like LSP and DAP. Such a project may find quite some use for, e.g. remote system administration tasks using ssh.