[WriteLog] Features and Modules

[Laurence 'Mike' Hammer]

At 04:41 PM 5/28/00 +0000, Scot Herrick wrote:
>While CT may have more copies sold and had a head start on the whole thing,
>it is DOS based. DOS is going to go away; albeit in the year 2525 for some
>amateur radio operators because of the huge amount of DOS radio programs out
>there.


DOS is going away a whole lot faster than that in terms of official 
support, and sooner in terms of actual hardware implementation.  "I'm a 
system designer and programmer at an Ivy League institution" (don't laugh 
too hard...) and just finished the spec on a rewrite of one of our 
DOS-based student info systems.  Microsoft's latest versions of Windows 
(WinNT4, Win98 and Win2000) have less support for DOS than even 
Win95.  Current hardware uses Plug'N'Play interrupts, which means many DOS 
apps can't even find the COM ports on recent machinery.

My probable timeline for DOS "ceasing to function" for our DOS database 
app, which uses direct hardware addressing for printing (similar to any LPT 
or COM addressing in contest programs) is June 2005.  Put simply, 
direct-to-hardware will die on or around that date, with no way to get it 
to work.  A lot of the old DOS ham radio programs use similar schemes to 
print, talk to COM ports etc.  From recent experience, you can already plan 
on DOS ham stuff not running reliably on anything built after 1/1/2000, but 
you can really plan on any direct hardware addressing done under the DOS 
scheme to just plain stop working after 1 June 2005.

Doing things like CW out the LPT port is pretty, well, interesting under 
the MS Plug'N'Play scheme.  I'm trusting Wayne & Co can keep it up as 
technology marches on.

73, Mike N2VR


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