If Professor C. Northcote Parkinson were writing his 1957 gem üParkinson’s Law@ today, he no doubt would have had something to say about computers.
One law would have been: Computer users will obtain as many program and data files as it takes to fill whatever size disk they happen to have.
Others would have been: The first time you do something new on a computer it will not work; a computer or program will cost twice as much as you think and will do only half the things you want it to do; the first time you show someone else a new trick you have learned on a computer it will embarrass you by not working. Attempts to upgrade a computer or a program will initially fail and attempts to restore it to the old position will also fail, usually rendering a computer useless at a critical time.
And thus burdened with the pessimism founded on experience, I opened MS-DOS 6.
Can it be that computers are becoming like toasters, refrigerators and stereo systems: take them out of the box, turn them on and they work? Experience seems to be telling computer programs that that is what users want to do. Or are users becoming smarter without knowing it?
Anyway, MS-DOS 6 is an open-the-box, plug-it-in and away-you-go sort of product. It broke nearly all the Hull-Parkinson laws of computing.
First of all, a big ha-di-ha-di-ha to all the people who rushed out a year or so ago and bought MS-DOS 5. You wasted your money. MS-DOS 6 is an upgrade-only program, but you can upgrade from versions earlier than 5.
The three big changes to DOS with version six are: the doublespace, anti-virus and undelete programs.
DOS 5 had an undelete program. The new version, however, works directly from Windows. It also has a sophisticated “”sentry” and “”tracker” system that (with a small amount of reserve disk space) will protect deleted files for longer. Moreover, if you split you hard disk into a C and D drive and put all your irreplaceable data files on D, you can give them preference by directing “sentry” and “”tracker” to operate on the D drive only.
A suggestion for DOS 7 would be to enable the user to give undelete preferences for files with certain suffixes. Thus the space created by deleting a .txt or .doc file might be the last to be over-ridden, enabling their recovery for a longer time. .exe files, on the other hand, which can be easily replaced by reloading software from floppies would be over-ridden first.
The anti-virus program is of little moment. It will tell you if any of the standard viruses are on your system, and is as good and as easy to use as many of the specialist virus seekers on the market. However, it seems silly to have virus program incorporated in an operating system, because upgrades of an operating system are infrequent; but new viruses are appearing all the time.
On the other hand, Doublespace is a smasher. This program alone is worth the $99. And it is no doubt the reason why MS-DOS 6 sold out in Canberra within two days of arriving here. “”We’ll have more in next week, give us a ring”, was the usual response from vendors.
On the Toshiba laptop with an 84Mb hard disk, it did wonders. The disk was chockers. I had to move 4.5Mb to floppies to run Doublespace. It gave me 45Mb of free space, which would fit, say, 75Mb of uncompressed files on it.
The amount you save will vary according to the type of files you have. Data compresses better than programs. A games and program freak will not get so much. Hard-working journalists who store everything they write will get much more, especially if the nascent Great Australian Novel is also sitting on disk.
The MS-DOS 6 licence permits the program to be loaded at work and at home, provided the machines are not used at the same time. So I loaded it on to the generic 386 at home. It compressed the 42Mb hard disk, resulting in 22.4Mb free space, into which I guess you could fit, say, 38Mb of uncompressed material.
Doublespace is not a misnomer. It does, in fact, double the amount of space on the hard disk. At $99 (that’s the initial offer price which will go to $199 mid-year) for MS-DOS 6 it is a steal. It would cost me about $800 to replace my 84Mb with a 160Mb disk.
Once loaded, Doublespace automatically compresses new files as you create them or load them from a floppy. You don’t know it is there. Further, it does not affect full-text-search programs, such as the find-file program in Word for Windows.
A warning. Doublespace takes ages to run. It took an hour to load on the laptop. But you only have to do it once.
There is also a defragmentation program. When you delete files and put new ones on of different sizes the new ones are fragmented to fit in the existing vacant spots on the disk. The defragmentation file collates the files and shifts them around on the disk space so each file is sitting in only one place on the disk. It makes the computer run slightly faster.
The MS-DOS 6 defragmentation file is extremely slow. It took nearly two hours to run on my computer. There is no abort button and turning the computer off would result in disaster. There are much better defragmentation programs around, such as VOPT.
Doublespace will only run from DOS. That makes it harder to use, but it is still fairly straightforward.
Doublespace was a dead loss on the floppies I tried. Mine told me I had 2.3Mb on a 1.44Mb drive, but when I loaded files on to the floppies it said the disk was full before I had loaded even 1.4Mb’s worth. In other words, the uncompressed floppy was storing more than the compressed one. Also, every time you change floppies you have to “”mount” the new floppy (the word is DOS’s not mine!). This means exiting Windows and executing a DOS command. You cannot execute the DOS command through Windows. This makes using Doublespace with floppies more inconvenience than it is worth, with one exception: when you use back-up.
MS-DOS 6’s Memmaker program is a gem. In stead of mucking around manually with config.sys files as you did with DOS 5, DOS 6 does it automatically. It aims for ambitious configurations. If they don’t work it quickly and easily tries again.
On the generic computer it created 124,000 bytes of extra conventional memory. Before running it, the largest executable program was 499,000 bytes. After it was 617,000 bytes. The computer ran much faster.
Loading DOS 6 was a cinch. It also pre-empted things going wrong providing the user with easy ways to retrieve things.
A further partial breakthrough was a way of deleting unwanted files on DOS 6. The manual provides a list of some, but only some, of the program’s functions and the files that run them, so you can delete them if you don’t want those functions.
It’s a start. Every manual for every program should list every file and tell us what each one does, so we can axe useless ones, or transfer less-frequently-used ones to floppies. Sometimes a program will have a sub-program that takes up oodles of space which the user does not want because the same function is done better with another program. The chart and draw functions in Word for Windows, for example, are useless for someone with a specialist graphics program.
I suspect program vendors do not gives us a full list of files so that we fill up our disks and have to go out and buy MS-DOS 6 to get more space.