NEXT ISSUE                                                  January   1995

Essays On Software Engineering:
Software Bloat - Is It Here To Stay?                (c) 1994  By Herb Chong


When I asked some months back if the very large sized applications were a
symptom of sloppy programming,  Herb's response was - "Not entirely".
Although quite surprised, my snappy comeback was "explain yourself" ! He did
in one of the more literate documents I've ever read on the subject. "You
should do an article on this subject", said I, with glowing after the fact
wisdom, never suspecting it would be written for a not yet conceived
WindoWatch.

Herb sent me an electronic scrawl in response to my request for a paragraph
or two on his "bloat" piece.  His key headings

More, Cheaper, Faster, and Sooner: Industry pressures to get "hot" software
out the door as cheap and quickly as possible....and faster than the
competition.

RTFM  (Read the Fine Manual) noting that few users do read the docs until
forced into doing so.

Imperatives like "I Want It Yesterday!" speak to ongoing industry pressures
to stay several jumps ahead of the competition.

Topics like "It Works.  What More Do You Want?" One really can't get the
flavor of frustration on the part of users when encountering the various
bugs produced by pressures of getting the product out the door without quite
enough testing. We have all encountered sloppy setup.inf files wasting big
amounts of time during the installation process that can drive one up
a wall.

"We All Pay" in terms of software that doesn't quite accomplish what the
PR hype purports it to do.  Sometimes only a maintenance release many weeks
later fixes the problems of buggy software.

Herb queries "When Will It End?"  No comment!


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The Future of DOS -
What's in Store for DOS Users and Developers in the Coming Year.....

                                        (c)   1994 By Paul Williamson


Since the introduction of MS-DOS version 1.0 in 1981, DOS has gone through
more than ten  major changes.  Version 1.0 was originally designed for the
IBM PC and only supported single-sided diskettes.  In 1983, version 2.0, the
first major revision, was released which added support for a hierarchical
directory structure and the implement-ation of fixed (hard) disks.  1984
brought versions 3.0, 3.1, 3.2 and the highly acclaimed version 3.3 to market,
adding support for the 1.2Mb diskettes,  Microsoft networking support, 3.5
inch floppy drives and disk partitioning.  Probably the most powerful version
of DOS came in 1991, with the introduction of MS-DOS 5.0.  A few evangelists
started proclaiming that the future of DOS is limited and that it will only
be a matter of time before DOS is completely eliminated and replaced by
Windows.  Early in 1993, Microsoft announced their latest Disk Operating
System, DOS 6.0.  This version of DOS is very similar to DOS 5.0 simply
because the base functionality of DOS 6.x is built on DOS 5.0, but that's
where the similarity ends.  DOS 6.0 became a full blown package of utilities
and applications.

It must be noted that most of the changes, at least the major changes, weren't
made to the Operating System itself, but to the utilities and support modules
for users to better use the existing operating system.  Does this mean that
DOS has reached the end of the line as far as core development goes?  What
more can be done?  Inducing from the plans released by Microsoft, Novell and
IBM for the software to be released within the next six to twelve months, it
certainly doesn't appear that much serious development will be done on DOS as
we know it.  However, DOS isn't dead, and it won't die from lack of use either.

According to published information from Microsoft,  WINDOWS 95 will fully
support the current implementation of the DOS and the DOS memory structure.
WINDOWS 95 allows for an improved DOS VM as well as being able to create a
stand-alone "real" DOS environment, which removes Windows completely  - well,
almost!   "Support for MS-DOS based applications, device drivers, TSRs does
not go away in Chicago.  In fact, Chicago offers better compatibility for
running MS-DOS based applications than Windows 3.1 does, including
applications that are hardware-intensive, such as games.  Microsoft  Windows
"Chicago" Reviewer's Guide.

In the premier edition of WindoWatch, we will briefly examine the details of
the history of MS-DOS and what the future holds for DOS inside of WINDOWS 95.
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      And.......

			         Derek  Buchler
			          Paul Kinnaly
		                 Jerry Laulicht
		               Angela Lillystone
		  	       Peter Neuendorffer
