Comparing Debian Netinstall with MSDOS

v 0.2

15Feb12

Why would I bother comparing Debian Netinstall with MSDOS?  Sounds silly - HOWEVER - when you look at it in a historical perspective, it is quite interesting.  This has no secret how-to at the end, I was simply thinking this morning when I was doing my 3k walk ... "isn't that cool" ....

In the '80s, MSDOS was king.  You got to pay good money to get a box and some diskettes that had a single user operating system that you could add to to get anything useful done.  Of course, if you were keen, you had the batch language and GWBASIC, but that was pretty much it.

• If you wanted, you could pay more good money and get Turbo-Pascal, or MS-Basic or some other compiled language.
• Perhaps you'd like to spend some more money and buy QNX - a multi-user system (that I think still exists).
• How about a DOS Markup Text processing language?

Now, Debian Netinstall (doesn't matter whether it is Squeeze or Wheezy, the principle is the same) - you get to download it for free.  Looking at what you get in what is considered today to be "a bootstrap loader" for the real system - well we are smothered in riches and don't even know it.

• You get the same sort of screen those MS-DOS users got, except you have Bash - a powerful programming language in its own right - but that is the SHELL!   
• zip/unzip .. bzip .. grep ... awk ... wow!
• Multi-User / Multi-tasking out of the box.
•  Not happy with Bash?  How about Perl?  Pretty hard to beat that!
• Typesetting?  Groff.  At least as powerful as those systems you paid good money for, but .. yes .. it's free.
• No edline here - Vim.  You may laugh, however Vim is a pretty damn powerful editor.  But if you don't like that, how about Nano - still better than anything MS included at that time.

 There's more, but you get my drift ..



Later ...