A school teacher at a small charter school, teaching various levels of math and a few foreign languages. This person was pretty technically proficient - they used a linux to access the web, but it was set up to boot a browser in to full-screen kiosk mode, and they pretty much just searched webpages and printed things out sometimes, no email really.

The DOS was DRDOS 7.22, and it was very elaborately set up -- it boots from a CDROM or USB flash disk as a live disk. On the disk is every assignment, homework, or test for any of the various courses he taught, carefully organized. They are in WordPerfect 5.1 with a few graphics in another program, and a graphing ( as in X-Y cartesian plots ) program also, all ancient freeware DOS. The three programs come up instantly on boot in different terminate-and-stay-resident screens, that you switch to with a control-alt combo, very like switching terminals in text mode linux.

This meant he could take a CDROM to school, pop it in the horibly slow and ad-laden windows computer some government program had given the school for free, boot, disconnect the printer from the network to the constarnation of other teachers and plug in a USB cable, and print his assignments, and never bring back viruses. The students when they learned of this situation would search out old viruses on the web and try to infect everything.

But using windows and mac was pretty limited to a little bit of browsing, and occasionally going to a dedicated machine with the right program already set up, to enter grades and time sheets and etc.

Well, not really DOS, but company where I did migration (15+ years ago) from 4GL and AIX to Linux and Aubit 4GL did exactly that. They all used HyperTerminal (after me, putty) to connect and start all sorts of apps, think, SQL AND UI at the same time, terminal apps, with keyboard shortcuts that MUST be exactly the same, otherwise you would have mutiny.

They are sold a few years ago, new owner just needs a good (and huge) location in the city, if they continued, nothing would change for people working there. They saw Windows as something just for minesweeper and solitaire, nothing else.

Maybe the GP is friends with George RR Martin.

This is perhaps an indirect confirmation that The Winds of Winter is back on track.

I'm still using DOS to control a galvo-steered LASER animation system from 30 years ago. 133MHz Pentium, non-MMX, 16MB RAM, 16MB Voodoo3.

> Who the heck has been using DOS (!?) until "pretty recently"? On what machine?

Not "DOS" in the classical sense, but a good corporate travel agent will probably spend the majority of their day in Amadeus or Sabre on a terminal emulator app - and be much, MUCH faster than clicking around in web portals.