16 Mar
2001
16 Mar
'01
12:40 a.m.
> Experience with DOS 3.11 and 5.0 is that for an
unprotected OS
> it was fairly solid and not inclined to kill itself. I have two systems
> that live as DOS with uptimes measured in months.
It's all a matter of clean applications. The
voicemail/auto-attendant
system (DOS-based) I use at home is one I designed, and there isn't a
single memory leak or null pointer write bug in it. It's completed and
totally debugged and never crashes. It stays up for months, and only gets
disturbed when I take it down to look in logs.
[...] I think the record was 4 months
running, and it would've been longer but we took it down for PM. This was
a complex application too, doing voice processing, serial communications,
network datagrams over NetBIOS, etc.
You can say the same about Linux :) My server has an
uptime of 253 days.
Well, I did a dial in system for a fiels servis application - up
to 32 modem ports, where the laptop (8085 based Tandy M100, Nec
or Olivetti, later PCs) did some kind of APPC with one or more
main frame application - I had to do add a small multi tasking
system atop of DOS, and this baby did run quite fine on a 286
System .... maximum Uptime of one of the systems (they where
installed in several European countries) was a bit more than
THREE YEARS. And this machine in particular (in Spain) has only
been shutdown to be replaced by a new Unix system .... They needed
a 17,000 $ Hardware to replace my 3,000$ Sytem :))) and ... well,
communication was slower and a bit more line drops :))
Anyway, Dos can be a quite stable base.
Gruss
H.
P.S.: One of the features I still like most was the self debugging
version for 485/25 CPUs ... The app did singlestep itself in
real time. So I got finaly great traces wehn anything went
wrong - a feature known from some aminframe systems which I
still miss a lot in actual PC systems.
--
VCF Europa 2.0 am 28./29. April 2001 in Muenchen
http://www.vintage.org/vcfe
http://www.homecomputer.de/vcfe