>>Coming from the Motorola world of 32 bit CPUs DOS was feeling like kindergarten...
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>Ditto, coming from VAX VMS on the job and Atari TOS at home. Both far better.

Yupp, Atari gave me the power to implement my first program bringing in more than monthly meals ;-)
Prospero Pascal, Prospero Fortran,minimal GFA Basic, first encounters with dBase Clones via dBMan
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>>- extended DOS access to MBs of RAM
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>Only after years of grating on our nerves with EMS, XMS and UMB... so much fight over 384 kilobytes, sheesh...

Noooooo,
384 was the hole memory you could tweak TSR programs in at first.
Expanded Mem shifted a memory window (64KB?) into adress space above usual 640K
Extended Mem was linear above 1MB and a whooping 7MB on my very own first handcrafted 386 (25Khz??), after having been broken in for a few years under OS/2 character mode (linear adress space, beyond FAT32 disc access)

Ported Prospero stuff to ModulaII and C for a sizeable sum to sell and worked on it til 98...

QEMM386 I think allowed remapping even that hole area into extended mem, but extended memory was accessed via DOS extenders (encountered FPDos in extended and normal mode, spelunked around but was horrified of their C interface (Watcom compiler?)

Rainer Becker, perhaps known to a few fox heads, known to me from his Atari days went full steam into Fox. When my Gig ended in 98, he threw me a FPW optimizing task his other programmers could not handle and a huge contract depended on. He got the contract I became a fox dev with some traditional typed lang background ;-)

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>>- TCP/IP killing off Novell head aches
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>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.
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>> (NetBEUI was kinda limited, but no head ache)
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>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.

W95 and W98 never really clicked with me: OS/2, then WinNT and from day 1 W2K for a looong stretch. Multiboot with C: booting W98 for emergencies, but never really running... Setting upTCP/IP easy on manual as long as the streadsheet with the usable/correct IP settings was on site.

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>>- plug+play not only internally, but via USB starting with W2K
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>That was a nerve saver, true.

And moving off SCSI to SATA was nice too: never catastrophic problems, but took half a day to set up the 4 to 6 devices, becoming quesy if 2 controllers were needed or different SCSI cable types were in the loop...