>Coming from the Motorola world of 32 bit CPUs DOS was feeling like kindergarten...
Ditto, coming from VAX VMS on the job and Atari TOS at home. Both far better.
>- extended DOS access to MBs of RAM
Only after years of grating on our nerves with EMS, XMS and UMB... so much fight over 384 kilobytes, sheesh...
>- TCP/IP killing off Novell head aches
Novell was a pain to set up and it just had to have things done its own way, but at least it ran on DR DOS, with far fewer bugs. And once you got it running you could pretty much forget it. We had a server on 3.12 which nobody touched for years, had no keyboard nor monitor. Looked into it once and it had one log entry - one power out took longer than the UPS could hold.
> (NetBEUI was kinda limited, but no head ache)
Yes, limited to about 4 workstations. Then the incessant "I'm here!" calling by each workstation would be too much for any usable traffic to get by. We just killed it off and installed tcp/ip under W98 DOS (without actually running windows) and had good networking... unless it developed an IP conflict and tried to resolve it automatically, then it would take all day to set up, and may revert to chaos anytime.
>- plug+play not only internally, but via USB starting with W2K
That was a nerve saver, true.