Great Dos Features Lost

Great DOS features lost in the transition to Windows: none. They're still there, but sometimes buried.

Also, some Windows applications have settings and behaviors (e.g., default directory) that don't exist in their DOS counterparts.

Bad DOS features lost in the transition to Windows: many.

The command interpreter is still with us, and .BAT files still work, and shorcuts (.LNK & .PIF) serve well to launch applications (or batch files for that matter) with a default directory selection.

And these can be run either in a window or in full-screen mode.

The feature may not see as much use as it once did, but it's certainly still there.

Notepad and Wordpad search for data in My Documents, but that's the fault of those editors, not MicrosoftWindows. Others remember whatever directory you used last time. VI and gVim and a number of other editors that don't a) assume Windows conventions or b) insist on using the registry, did just fine, using the default directory. The DOS "edit.exe" program (which still ships with Windows) assumes current directory and behaves just as you would expect.

Incidentally, if one is trying to use the DOS methods and utilities, executing Windows programs from a DOS prompt breaks the assumptions. When you used DOS 6.0 you couldn't invoke notepad - it wasn't there!

True! All other types of Dos batch files seem to work with Windows except this particular one. Does Edit.exe do anything special to a batch file?

Yes, it seems that Microsoft has "enhanced" Notepad and Wordpad to ignore the current directory, in favor of always defaulting to "My Documents." On the other hand, with more compliant programs, you don't need a BAT file to set the working directory, you can do so directly in the Shortcut properties. I commonly copy a number of my most useful shortcuts to my personal Start menu, or subdirectories of it - sort of a manual version of WinXP's most recently used programs feature. -- JeffGrigg

I kind of miss the AbortRetryFail? dialog that pops up whenever DOS feels like; and which applications pretty much could not disable... :)

I miss "CLS" for when apps screw up and leave artifacts all over the screen

Of course there's always [F5] or rightclick-view-refresh for that ...

That only works per-app, not for the desktop.

I also miss:

Ten-second bootups
Instant reboots
- Of course, with DOS you need both... :)
  - Or Windows. Computers may double in speed every 18 months, but the failure rate remains constant.
Knowing why and where a bootup hung
- F5/F8 under Windows will get rid of the graphics logo and give you a console; at least in older versions.
  - True in theory, but I just spent the past two days trying to figure out why Windows was hanging - even when trying recovery console. . . ended up having to reinstall everything
Bootdisks allowing one to delete files off a hard drive - try that with NTFS
- Heck, Unix will still allow you do rm -rf / if you're root. :)
  - Sure, in Unix you have to ask, but Windows will crash your hard drive proactively!
- With an appropriate Linux boot disk, this is quite possible; my preferred solution is to correct the error of converting to NTFS in the first place - I don't think that it's worth the tradeoffs.
A choice in operating systems that still let me run the same binaries
Plaintext operating system configuration files

Ever played with dosemu under Linux? While Linux won't boot in ten seconds, it boots pretty fast. And it has plaintext config files as opposed to the WindowsRegistry?; and if you boot Linux off a floppy, you own the system. (Whether or not this is a good or a bad thing is debatable; many security pros agree, though, that preventing intrusion by someone with physical access to a machine is impossible).

I miss watching defrag move files around really really fast!

Usually, features aren't lost, but they are made less accessible.

I actually prefer finding files in dos with combination of dir *keyword*.ext /s and |find "keyword" to windows' "find files" thing... Of course there are some things dir can't do, but when it's possible, I'd rather call command line than "find".

And I kinda liked the change directory command. I mean, nowadays, if there's a lot of files you lose a lot of time looking for the directories/files. In dos/norton you could always cast "cd d:\games\quake" and it would just work. (Of course, you could always type the directory in the address bar, but it somehow doesn't feel right, I mean it feels like _work_ as opposed to clicking a few nifty icons.)

And command line ftp client is way better than GUI ftp, at least when you're ftp-ing to your own site, and you don't want the thing to spend about one minute downloading the file list every time you change directory, or any file manipulation (because you already know what's there, and you know what will be there once you upload).