I liked DOS. You could have it on a floppy with enough space left to do other things. I didn't like or use Windows until 95. I got alot of milage out of DOS with QuickBASIC then later QuickC. For $99, those programs were a great bang for the buck in my opinion.
When I moved to Linux, I was less impressed and less shocked compared to the experience from DOS to BeOS.
I had a shock when I left DOS for BeOS, because suddenly everything was different
At that time I was used to installing everything by hands on a primitive i486 machine where you need to install a card and a driver, for each device.
For example, the CDROM was not ATAPI-IDE or SCSI, it was a proprietary Creative thing for which you needed to install an ISA16 card and a couple of drivers and also edit the "config.sys" file to tell the operating system how to configure them.
The same applied to the network card, there were just a few NICs supported by DOS, mostly by 3COM You had to manually setup IRQ, DMA, and edit the "config.sys" accordingly.
When I moved to BeOS v5 I found no floppy disk but only a bootable CDROM. WOW it was a new for me, I hadn't never seen before an OS you can install from a CDROM.
Until then my era experience with DOS had been three floppy disks for the core of the OS plus nine for misc(1), and a couple of days for the setup, especially to make some utilities able to "suspend" and "resume" by TSR. It was a crude set of hacks.
Then I moved from a 486 to a PentiumII, BeOS was already ready to have multitasking, audio and video support already built-in, networking capabilities with just a couple of hacks.
BeOS v5.01 didn't naively support networking, I had to install an add-on called "net-bone", which basically added utilities like "telnet, fpt, finger, ..." and later also "scp ssh".
I also installed a C compiler package, gcc-v2.95, which I used to develop my applications and tools. This was completely different from the experience with Borland Turbo C. Different compilers, different libraries, different dialects (Borland vs GNU), different workflow, different debugging workflow (IDE debug vs GDB), different cost (90 Euro as "student pack" vs opensource).
Years later, I don't remember it as a bad experience, it was just a different experience, and even the Linux experience (kernel v2.2 and v2.4 at the time) is different from what we have today (kernel v5)
(1)
- Norton Utilities
- Procomm (like Minicom on Linux)
- Borland' compilers { Basic, Pascal, C } (90 euro each, as "student pack")
- driver for a pretty nice serial (RS232) trackball mouse
- driver for the CDROM, not ATAPI, it was Creative's proprietary interface provided by the SoundCard
- driver for the sound-card Creative SoundBlaster16
- driver for 3COM network card
- Microsoft Lan suite with TCP/IP and UDP/IP tools and libraries
9 floppy disks for these, paid 400 euro for this!