Making Utilities For MS-DOS
English 4
Mr. Siedlecki
Making Utilities for MS-DOS
These days, when computers play an important role in virtually all aspects of
our life, the issue of concern to many programmers is Microsoft's hiding of
technical documentation. Microsoft is by far the most important system software
developer. There can be no argument about that. Microsoft's MS-DOS operating
system has become a de facto standard (IBM's PC-DOS is actually a licensed
version of MS-DOS). And this should be so, because these systems are very well
written. The people who designed them are perhaps the best software engineers in
the world.
But making a computer platform that is a de facto standard should imply a good
deal of ...
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company that developed it?
Obviously, only the company that has developed that operating system will be
able to develop software for it. And this is a violation of the Antitrust Law.
And now I start having a suspicion that this is happening with Microsoft's
operating systems. It should be no secret to anyone that MS-DOS contains a lot
of undocumented system calls, data structures and other features. Numerous books
have been written on this subject (see bibliography). Many of them are vital to
system programming. There is no way to write a piece of system software, such as
a multitasker, a local area network, or another operating system extension,
without knowing this undocumented functionality in MS-DOS. And, sure enough,
Microsoft is using this functionality extensively when developing operating
system extensions. For example, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Network, and
Microsoft CD-ROM Extensions (MSCDEX) rely heavily on the undocumented internals
of MS-DOS.
The reader can ask, ...
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products called utilities. Utilities are programs
that don't serve end users directly, but extend an operating system to help
applications serve end users. To put it another way, utilities are helper
programs. Perhaps the best way to learn when you have to mingle with DOS
internals is to spend some time developing an utility for MS-DOS. A good example
is SteelBox, an utility for on-the-fly data encryption. This development project
have made me think about the use of DOS internals in the first place and it has
inspired me to write this paper.
Utilities like SteelBox, Stacker, DoubleSpace, new versions of SmartDrive, etc.
need to do the following trick: register with DOS as device drivers, ...
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Making Utilities For MS-DOS. (2008, September 2). Retrieved November 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Making-Utilities-For-MS-DOS/89271
"Making Utilities For MS-DOS." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 2 Sep. 2008. Web. 23 Nov. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Making-Utilities-For-MS-DOS/89271>
"Making Utilities For MS-DOS." Essayworld.com. September 2, 2008. Accessed November 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Making-Utilities-For-MS-DOS/89271.
"Making Utilities For MS-DOS." Essayworld.com. September 2, 2008. Accessed November 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Making-Utilities-For-MS-DOS/89271.
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