Originally published at: This terrible rap video will help you upgrade your computer's operating system - Boing Boing
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No thank you, Alan Rose Hill.
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This is someone’s wonderful thing. 
I found it interesting when discount Weird Al mentioned there were 60 million users waiting for an upgrade.
That’s…. Well, that’s a big number for the time. Barely a rounding error nowadays.
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Ev’rybody DOS now!
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I remember DOS 5. I was so excited for the disk compression, as I was really feeling the 20MB of my hard drive. Memory compression wasn’t an issue. I was swimming in 8MB of RAM. Loved that GUI, though.
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How in the hell did this company manage to dominate the world’s computer business? This is beyond cringe. Is there a word for cringier than cringe?
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Dos?
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Are you remembering correctly…? Disk compression was only introduced in DOS 6.
DOS 5 did have support for partitions larger than 32 MB. (That was actually introduced in DOS 4, but I guess no one really used that.)
Oh, and we need the “Windows/386” rap here.
(Part of a longer thing.)
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I see your “MS-DOS 5 Upgrade,” & I raise you one “Zap Rap:”
This was on repeat in the customer service waiting area at the City of Austin utility office (now Austin Energy), summer of 1990. Anyone needing to go in-person (e.g. to establish residential power) was a captive audience to this.
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You’re right. I think I’m conflating the two.
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I definitely wasn’t in the target audience for the GUI. I loved a feature that only gets a brief shout out in this ad, though: the full screen editor. Massive upgrade from edlin.
According to Wikipedia, the DOS shell actually premiered with DOS 4, but as others here have pointed out, no one used that.
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8MB of RAM? Luxury!
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Extra free RAM in that first 640KB still really mattered though. IIRC aside from being lighter this version of DOS was the first to support loading drivers into the Upper Memory Block (on all 386+ or any PC/XT & 286 with an EMS memory expansion with an appropriate driver that allowed you to reallocate some of the EMS RAM to the UMB).
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