> Can DOS access 128MB RAM?

Even MS-DOS can access lots of RAM, it just requires a little bit of fancy coding.

But, I suspect this person is asking for a command-line version, not a "DOS" version per se.

... and what they really want to do is run BOINC as a service, and just exit from the BOINC manager.

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When someone says "DOS", I think MS-DOS 6.22 and QBASIC. It's instinct.

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Hi,
You are both correct, I should have labeled this as "pre-windows NT based windows", might have cleared up confusion, maybe interjected more, from what I see with this bunch, probably would have caused more confusion.
DOS7.10 is much better than dos 6.22, handles USB, fat32 and fat32x drives supported, LBA extended X partition supported, longfilenames supported, >64MB handled, XXMS handled, better handling of UMB as compared to 6.22 or winxx, etc., etc., I can read/write to my 1G USB memory stick.
Best/fastest running win app on it is 95 or 98, depending upon your win app.

Anyway, just like ham radio, DOS isn't dead.

Just look at who they refer to in times of crisis, good old ham radio operators get the news into/outof regions when all other power is down, phonelines, etc.,

Same with computers, when you need for speed, dos can't be beat (unless you roll your own).

Thanks,
John Henry
Sevierville, TN

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Thanks, and Keep on crunchin'
John Henry KI4JPL
Sevierville TN

I started with nothing,
and I still have some of it left.
<img src="http://www.boincstats.com/stats/banner.php?cpid=989478996ebd8eadba8f0809051cdde2">

Anyway, just like ham radio, DOS isn't dead.
I didn't say it was dead - Just not as robustly supported by the mainstream.

Just look at who they refer to in times of crisis, good old ham radio operators get the news into/outof regions when all other power is down, phonelines, etc.,
Have you been in the Café again? !-D

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First of all, the comparisons of SETI@Home Classic in whatever version to BOINC Powered SETI@Home misses the critical distinction.

They are not doing the same science anymore. This is one of the reasons to move to BOINC, the science done is better. And it is going to get better in the future with the next generation ... which is going to slow down the time again because the work done is more complete (read Better).

This is one of the drivers behind breaking the WU count metric... you cannot compare an "early" SETI@Home Classic WU with a "late" one as they changed the processing. With BOINC that happened again.

Last point, DOS is not an OS, it is a program loader.

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> Thanks Janus,
> This 15-30% thruput seems to backup the speed increases I found.
> Tried it with the linux kernel, and saw the same.
> Less overhead, less interrupting of a process, etc., What a wonderful world it
> is/was.
>
Ver 4.19 does have a Boinc_cli.exe in it. Version 4.25 does not.
In Boinc the cli is NOT faster, but as to whether you can run it in a DOS window, I have no idea. I am still running the CLI for Classic on some of my machines but I run it thru SetiDriver. I DO NOT open a DOS window and run the CLI that way.

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@Paul

DOS : Disk Operating System

The OS still stands for operating system.

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98SE XP2500+ @ 2.1 GHz Boinc v5.8.8

And God said"Let there be light."But then the program crashed because he was trying to access the 'light' property of a NULL universe pointer.

Hi Paul,
Your explanation is probably the best I've heard yet. I had assumed I was comparing apples to apples when comparing seti classic to boinc driven seti.
I do stand corrected then and have learned from this exchange.

I still wish a DOS version existed that would run under 7.10 or 6.22 for that matter, as it was a far faster and far superior system for crunching numbers, no system management interrupts a million times through the single work unit crunch. But I do understand that my comparison may not have been valid.

I guess my request is probably as lame as asking for a telegraph version of the internet. It exists to some extent today in the rf amateur radio world, but not widely used as the internet now.

Thanks,
John Henry
Sevierville, TN

> First of all, the comparisons of SETI@Home Classic in whatever version to
> BOINC Powered SETI@Home misses the critical distinction.
>
> They are not doing the same science anymore. This is one of the reasons to
> move to BOINC, the science done is better. And it is going to get better in
> the future with the next generation ... which is going to slow down the time
> again because the work done is more complete (read Better).
>
> This is one of the drivers behind breaking the WU count metric... you cannot
> compare an "early" SETI@Home Classic WU with a "late" one as they changed the
> processing. With BOINC that happened again.
>
> Last point, DOS is not an OS, it is a program loader.
>

---

Thanks, and Keep on crunchin'
John Henry KI4JPL
Sevierville TN

I started with nothing,
and I still have some of it left.
<img src="http://www.boincstats.com/stats/banner.php?cpid=989478996ebd8eadba8f0809051cdde2">

> DOS : Disk Operating System
>
> The OS still stands for operating system.

Yes, and I have some "bech-front" property that you might like.

You can call anything, anything you want ... but that does not make it so ...

Besides, BillG said no one needs more the 640K ... Oh, and XP does not have any flaws ...

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DOS is very much alive on mine, I had to use it the other day to troubleshoot my cablemodem.


.

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No matter where you go, there you are...

> I still wish a DOS version existed that would run under 7.10 or 6.22 for that
> matter, as it was a far faster and far superior system for crunching numbers,
> no system management interrupts a million times through the single work unit
> crunch. But I do understand that my comparison may not have been valid.

The exact thing that you are annoyed by, the preemptable nature of a multitasking/multiprocessing operating system is exactly what BOINC needs to communicate with the science applications.

BOINC and the science applications work off the assumption that they are running at the same time. BOINC also assumes its pointers are 32-bit. I would hate to have to deal with near and far pointers again.

Somebody would have to spend several hundreds of hours tweaking the code and special casing something like QView ( At least I think that was the tool that introduced a multitasking DOS environment to DOS by using virtual machines) into the mix.

I think I am going to agree with Paul on this, DOS is a fancy program loader, with enough tinkering you can add enough layers to it to make it seem like an OS, but in the end it’ll still unload command.com when memory is tight in the 640kb area.

BTW, comparing the default Windows installation to a flight control system isn’t a very fair comparison, the emergency command console for Windows that is only 6mb or so in size and command line only would have been better. It is the Windows kernel and default device drivers without the entire GUI fluff. End the end, the flight control system is a special purpose program with a limited number of inputs, relatively speaking. Windows tries to be everything for everybody, device drivers, devices, programs, and people.

On my Windows machine, I currently have over 300+ threads queued, I would expect weird latency issues when attempting real-time operations. For a real-time OS I would expect to find less than 10.

Besides, the NT kernel wasn’t originally designed to be a real-time OS, WinCE was supposed to take that market. I know MS has been putting in a lot of work to both codebases to try and support real-time operations and both OS’s get rid of the GUI and fluff as a first step, what your left with isn't even recognizable as Windows unless you have used NT without the Win32 graphical environment before..

I’m not sure what the latest and greatest news is on the Windows real-time support front is though, it has been over 3 years since I have work on the Windows development team.

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----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley
My Blog

If you want to provide as much CPU time as possible to the S@H worker process, use an optimized SETI@Home worker running on top of a minimalistic Linux install...

I don't think you can get any more stripped down with that.

And, people *do* use Linux for realtime programming...

---

Rob

Well I guess the only point I was realy trying to make here is, you don't use a hammer to screw in a screw when a screwdriver will do just fine.

I've seen embedded real-time, or at least it was claimed to be real-time, devices running the NT Kernel, I've even seen WinCE devices that do and claim the same damn thing.

In the end, for something like a flight control system, I wouldn't trust, Windows, DOS with a bunch of different layers, Linux, or any other general purpose OS. It would have to be an OS built specifically from the ground up to be an embedded real-time OS.

---

----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley
My Blog

> In the end, for something like a flight control system, I wouldn't trust,
> Windows, DOS with a bunch of different layers, Linux, or any other general
> purpose OS. It would have to be an OS built specifically from the ground up
> to be an embedded real-time OS.

I wouldn't trust x86 hardware, either. It's just too special case a situation, though, to compare with SETI@Home usage. It's like comparing Apples to toothbrushes. :-)

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Rob

> When someone says "DOS", I think MS-DOS 6.22 and QBASIC. It's instinct.

Actually, I think ROM-DOS 7.1 and Borland C. (and TCP/IP)

I think most people say "DOS" and mean "Command Line" -- as in the SETI Classic command line client.

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when i hear DOS i think of an old Zenith 286, DOS 3.0 had just come out, windows came on about 15 1.44MB disks... at the time i liked it after having worked on a Wang that would only hold 360Kb on a disk...

but after having to program a few databases and the like i didn't care too much for it

come to think about it i haven't used any BASIC in years... probably have forgotten more than i care to know

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No matter where you go, there you are...

> I think I am going to agree with Paul on this, DOS is a fancy program loader,
> with enough tinkering you can add enough layers to it to make it seem like an
> OS, but in the end it’ll still unload command.com when memory is tight in the
> 640kb area.

I don't think "fancy" is justified. It's a program loader.

That said, DOS works fine in a couple of mission critical applications here. As a program loader, it gets my real-time kernel loaded, and that takes care of starting up sockets, loading the appropriate Daemons and etc.

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> when i hear DOS i think of an old Zenith 286, DOS 3.0 had just come out,
> windows came on about 15 1.44MB disks...


sheeesh, I remember when a DOUBLE sided disk was a Wonder, Imean can you imagine. sheesh, Thank you Atari 1040 ST.

> sheeesh, I remember when a DOUBLE sided disk was a Wonder, Imean can you
> imagine. sheesh, Thank you Atari 1040 ST.

I've got some 8" floppies around here somewhere. At least they're DS/DD.

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> I've got some 8" floppies around here somewhere. At least they're DS/DD.
>

Ah yes... from the days when floppy disks really were 'floppy'. :)

Dig

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