[butter_pat_head]

My plug and play PCI based Soundblaster Live! laughs at this comment.  

PCI was awesome and a huge improvement in everyway. What MCA tried and failed to be.
 

I don't dispute that fact one iota, but it dosen't mean that ISA can't do plug and play either or my ISA SoundBlaster AWE64Gold and a large number of the later ISA NICs wouldn't exist.  

Memory handling was primarily done by drivers

Plug and Play?  Again in DOS that's a job for the drivers not DOS itself.

Source?

For the memory handling I quote a MS Knowledgebase article

This article contains an overview of how expanded memory that conforms to the Expanded Memory Specification (EMS) and extended memory that conforms to the Extended Memory Specification (XMS) is created and managed in MS- DOS versions 5.0 and later by the device drivers HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE.

Before you say 'they are a part of DOS' then think again as there have been for a long time a number of third party DOS memory managers.

For the plug and play issue I quote a section of the USBINTRO.DOC found in the DOS USB driver package on Bret Johnson's Home Page.

These DOS USB Drivers are "Plug-and-Play".  It doesn't matter if the software is installed before the hardware, or vice-versa.  For instance, you can leave a USB joystick plugged in all the time, and just load the joystick driver immediately before you load the game that uses the joystick, and unload the drivers as soon as the game is done.  Or, you can load the disk drive software through your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, leave it running all the time, and just plug and unplug your flash drives when you want to use them (just like you do with floppy drives).  The program architecture allows the correct hardware and software to "find" each other, no matter which one gets installed first.

Ultimately a lot of people dismiss DOS because they expect DOS to do a lot of things 'out of the box' that a more featured OS is capable of doing.  But step back for just a moment, what is DOS?  It is a Disk Operating System.  Not a memory operating system, not a peripheral operating system (to any meaningful extent) or suchlike.  All DOS has to do is perform disk operations and load executables into memory and execute them.  The app then does the rest with the help of drivers to access needed peripherals and calls DOS for any disk accesses, unless it does it itself by banging the metal.

[Nemesis6]

AWE64, Soundblaster... reminds me:

HMI MODULE ALPHA HUMANA ON APPROACH TO SPACE STATION MERCURY, anyone?

[Thaeris]

Elite?

[Nuke]

back in the dos era pretty much every piece of hardware had its own standardized memory address. sound cards were rather shaky though, to use them in a game you usually had to run a setup program that would either try to find the address to your sound card's registers or youd have to enter it yourself (usually selecting it from a short list, there werent many places for them to go). dos had tsr (terminate-stay resident) programs which were usually utilities but were sometimes used as drivers for some hardware. but most of time you usually had to compile the drivers right into the application itself. good example of this is the many dos games designed to work with voodoo cards (though they may have had memory-resident drivers, im not sure). just back then if a dos game had voodoo support, generally you had to download an executable capable of running it.

dos is still evolving. freedos now supports 4gb of ram, you also have freedos 32, which is aimed at being an embedded plaform. 64 bit dos is just around the corner no doubt. dos is very useful for not-multitasking applications. car audio is a good example. mpxplay is a nice little mp3 jukebox that runs in native dos and can make use of many soundcards. get an old computer some flashcards and a small lcd with touchscreen, amp and some speakers and you got a nice car mp3 player system.

[Bobboau]

isn't DOS owned by microsoft? how is it evolving?

[karajorma]

MSDos is. Lot's of other versions of DOS weren't. Windows originally could run on those as well.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

MS-DOS is owned by Mickysoft.  There are several other versions most of which are free.  Not sure how many are still around but there was APPLE-II DOS (1980ish) DR-DOS, PC-DOS, FREEDOS, IBM's version (can't remember the name), Novell had one but dropped it when bootable  CD's came out for I think DR-DOS.  Heck even Tandy, Commodore, and Atari had a version of DOS.  Come to think of it the only machine that I can think of that didn't have a DOS was the old Texas Instruments thing and that was because it didn't have disk drives just cassette tape.  Even most of the mainframes I worked on had a version of DOS although they don't call it DOS.  

So yea there are a lot of DOS versions probably still out there.  Boot a HD Diag disk and it will probably boot DOS then load some extensions or another OS.  

[butter_pat_head]

AWE64, Soundblaster... reminds me:

HMI MODULE ALPHA HUMANA ON APPROACH TO SPACE STATION MERCURY, anyone?

Ahh!  I remember that one!  Some soundcard setup progs used that soundbyte to test if you had selected the right options.

[Nuke]

MS-DOS is owned by Mickysoft.  There are several other versions most of which are free.  Not sure how many are still around but there was APPLE-II DOS (1980ish) DR-DOS, PC-DOS, FREEDOS, IBM's version (can't remember the name), Novell had one but dropped it when bootable  CD's came out for I think DR-DOS.  Heck even Tandy, Commodore, and Atari had a version of DOS.  Come to think of it the only machine that I can think of that didn't have a DOS was the old Texas Instruments thing and that was because it didn't have disk drives just cassette tape.  Even most of the mainframes I worked on had a version of DOS although they don't call it DOS. 

So yea there are a lot of DOS versions probably still out there.  Boot a HD Diag disk and it will probably boot DOS then load some extensions or another OS. 

the ibm version of dos was just called PC-Dos. i used to own the manual for it a long time ago. its technically the only os ive ever had that came with a complete manual.