After a five-year gap since the release of PC-DOS 7, IBM
has announced the next release of the venerable Disk
Operating System. These guys just don't know when to quit.
To be fair, there probably are a bunch of IBM customers running DOS-based
systems who are terrified if not downright bitchy about Y2K issues. PC-DOS 2000
promises to be a fix for any Y2K problems in DOS, and like DOS 7 before it,
comes with a number of features handed down from OS/2 development.
PC-DOS 2000 uses Rexx as a secondary batch language. Say what you like about
Rexx, it's not the greatest language on God's Green Earth, but it's loads better
than the .bat files we all grew up with, and all in all it's not a bad
language. PC-DOS 2000 has the actual, licensed Stac compression technology,
comes with a decent text editor (similar to a text-based version of OS/2's EPM),
and adds Euro symbol support.
So, they've done a good job of putting this package together (I'm guessing based
on the feature list and having used PC-DOS 7). But this is 1999! Get a grip!
Well, at least this will give the OS/2 users out there hope that IBM will have a
new version waiting for them. Hahahahahaha!!!!
