I've been an MS-DOS 6.22/Win3.1 user since their release. Now I'd like to replace MS-DOS with something better.
Yeah, wouldn't we all. Unfortunately, there are few choices in the operating system realm. It's pretty much either:
IBM has recently announced PC-DOS 2000; it, like their DOS 7.0, differs from MS-DOS primarily in accessory programs, not in any major difference in the operating system itself. The IBM web site includes detailed comparisons between PC-DOS and MS-DOS in a number of areas; check out:
http://www.software.ibm.com/os/dos/
Another option is DR-DOS, formerly OpenDOS. Its principal advantage is that it's freely downloadable from www.caldera.com. This is based on DR-DOS, which became Novell DOS, and has some interesting features, most notably built-in multitasking. However, the multitasking is not as good as DESQview, there are compatability problems with some key utilities like QEMM, EMM386 has bugs and in general I think you'd want to be quite good at tinkering with your system before you play with this one. If Caldera continues development, however, this could become an excellent way to go.
Another freely downloadable DOS is FreeDOS; however, this is in a much less "finished" state even than OpenDOS. Other than "features" (utilities, etc.), I see little reason to prefer any of the three major DOS's over the others. All are very small and very fast; you won't see any appreciable difference in speed among them. All will run Win 3.x--though if you want to see a difference in speed, the best thing you can do is stop loading this glorified menu program on top of DOS and get some good DOS apps.
In my opinion, unless you have some particular need (for example, if you can't live without disk compression, you might want to get the IBM flavor to get Stacker), MS-DOS combined with QEMM and DESQview is about as good as it gets for operating systems at present.
Jon Visick
visick@ewald.mbi.ucla.edu
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