Rip Dos Microsoft Symbolically Buries Operating System
DOS is dead, and if you doubt it, just ask that shotgun-toting Bill Gates.
Gates, dressed for Halloween as the kill-everything-that-flinches anti-hero of the popular computer game DOOM, told a Microsoft Corp. party Monday night that DOS has been 86’ed by Windows 95.
Still, as Microsoft’s chairman and founder, Gates was being subtle. In a campy skit that preceded Gates’ video appearance, Microsoft employees dressed as Satan and his henchmen consigned a woebegone computer user to the deepest levels of hell for persisting in playing a DOS-based game.
“You would flirt with the likes of DOS and expect to go unpunished?” the devil sneered as the lost soul was led away.
Monday’s event, “Microsoft Judgment Day,” was a combination trade show and kickoff party for 75 new games and accessories made to work under Windows 95. In addition to Gates’ theatrics, the show featured a haunted house in a Microsoft parking garage, complete with scantily clad, bludgeon-wielding she-devils, and hooded monks guiding guests to a row of guillotines for assembly-line executions.
Microsoft, the world’s largest maker of personal computer software, built its fortune - and multibillionaire Gates’ - on MS-DOS, the computer operating system that became the industry standard in the early 1980s. DOS later was supplanted by Microsoft Windows, a graphics-based operating system, and Microsoft hopes Windows 95, the newest version that was launched in August, will make DOS completely obsolete.
Many computer users would agree that trying to play DOS games under Windows approaches damnation. Graphics-intensive DOS games compete with Windows for limited computer memory, and getting a program to run often means days of trial and error, endless tinkering and substantial blind luck.
Furthermore, DOS games frequently must be individually configured to run with a vast array of sound and video equipment, joysticks and other computer hardware - a long, frustrating and often unsuccessful process.
With DOS, Gates said, “It’s been impossible to install the games, tough for users, tough for developers.”
Gates, dressed in a blood-splattered vest and coat and lugging a shotgun, appeared in a video that placed him inside the DOOM playing field.
DOOM broke ground with its realistic 3-D graphics, and its copious digital bloodletting. In the game, a player assumes the persona of a commando who shoots, hacks and blasts his way down endless corridors filled with heavily armed zombies.
Gates wasn’t quite that fearsome, but then, he was making a sales pitch.
Microsoft, he said, is committed to providing game developers with top-notch tools, and “with their help we’ll be able to clean up this DOS mess.”
Exhibitors at the show said that while Windows 95 might not be heaven, it does make their lives and business plans easier.
Windows 95 and its game software tools let developers use Microsoft’s graphics, sound and networking software, rather than having to write it themselves. Working under Windows 95, game makers also don’t have to fret about whether their programs will work with the endless combinations of computer hardware - those hardware “drivers” already are contained in the Microsoft program.
“I’m not sure I would call it a quantum leap, but it’s a hell of a lot of help,” said Kevin Hunt, director of development for Trimark Interactive Inc.
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