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Open Sourcing DOS 4

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Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#231

Post by lproven »

ListenLinda wrote: post #131
jmspring wrote: post #119

My brain is rusty, but I feel like MSDOS 5.11 was where things finally just worked. TSRs, memory managers, etc. Moving a lot and not being a packrat I've lost some of that history. It'd be interesting to see 5.x and 6.x released.

I think it was 3.3x where things started working. I don't recall 4.x being around much. I do remember 5 and 6. For some reason 4 never made a splash in my circle of friends.

4 was, TBH, appalling for its time.

It took more base memory than ever. It had a complicated code page system that most people didn't want, and a clunky early version of IBM DOSShell that was scorned although it grew into something useful.

But it supported disk partitions over 32MB, and for that reason, it was reluctantly adopted. If you had a 286 or 386, then there were measures that you could take with a memory manager to make it not so bad, but on 8088/8086 class hardware, it didn't leave enough free memory for many big apps to run.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#232

Post by lproven »

freedomben wrote: post #69
skeeter2020 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is accurate; the 2000 line targeted business, and if you remember having a consumer computer with 2000 pro it didn't support a lot of hardware.

Can confirm. I upgraded my 98 box to 2000 and never did get some of my hardware working. When I told people I was using 2000 everybody assumed I had stolen it from work. I didn't. My friend stole it from work and shared it with me ;-)

A license key of 11111-1111111 worked, if I remember correctly. :-)

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#233

Post by lproven »

bombcar wrote: post #96
LeoPanthera wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although 5.0 was the first version to include HIMEM.SYS

DOS 5.0 was peak perfection. 6.22 or whatever was just stupid double stack and other worthless garbage.

> stupid double stack

DoubleSpace/DriveSpace?

Mostly, you are absolutely right, yes. MS-DOS 5.0 was the peak, and then it started to acquire bloat as MS bundled stuff to compete with DR-DOS 6 and DR-DOS 7.

But the thing is that by modern standards, the bloat is tiny. :-)

I gave MS Office 97 a bad review at the time because it was several times bigger than Office 95, had virtually no new functionality, but introduced a pointless new file format just to get people to upgrade so they could read the files sent to them by companies with the newer version.

But for a decade now, Word 97 is my go-to version. With all the service releases installed, it works great, it's tiny by modern standards -- I think a full install of Word with all the optional filters and things totals 14MB -- and it's lightning fast on 21st century hardware.

Word 95 is even smaller and quicker, but it can't read or write the file format that everyone else, from Pages to Wordpad, uses. So it's crippled: everything has to go through LibreOffice first, to convert it to a .DOC format anything else can view, import, edit, or print.

Time changes the meaning of bloat somewhat.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#234

Post by lproven »

bombcar wrote: post #97
somat wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost completely unrelated to your comment, but it sparked a fun memory. At one point I had a system set up that would boot dos via ipxe with iscsi drives. I thought it was almost magical how dos had no clue it was using a network drive. I still don't know exactly how it worked. but I suspect ipxe was patching the bios.

DOS was pretty reliable about using BIOS interfaces for drives; if you imitate the BIOS interface it’ll just work. The problems came from limitations of the BIOS interface (especially size)

Yup. Boot DOS off a USB key and it suddenly speaks USB. :-)

Only for drives, but still...

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#235

Post by lproven »

dale_glass wrote: post #217

There's a thing I've been curious about for a while, might as well try and ask here. What does "DEVICE=" in config.sys actually do? As in, why is this in config.sys: device=c:\dos\emm386.exe and not just: c:\dos\emm386.exe in autoexec.bat?

The DEVICE line loads device drivers.

EMM386 is a device driver which needs to be started very early in the DOS boot process for it to work -- because most of the rest of DOS is then loaded into memory blocks that EMM386 provides.

It's an .EXE file because the command invocation gives some useful data -- but it can't load that way, and if it could it would be useless because then it was too late to load drivers into the memory regions it created.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#236

Post by lproven »

lynx23 wrote: post #207

Whenever I think about the good old DOS days, QEMM and DESQview come to mind. Esp. DESQview which was a rather essential part of my DOS experience... Sources for these would be fun to look at.

Many asked over the years. Sadly I think Symantec lost them after it acquired Quarterdeck.

DESQview/X was amazing. FreeDOS with DV/X would be something else: a multitasking DOS with a standard GUI, that spoke TCP/IP and could serve remote Linux/BSD apps over X11.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#237

Post by sebtron »

conkeisterdoor wrote: post #72

It looks like "brain damaged" was the developer's go-to insult when frustrated :D 2024-04-25 19:35 ~/sort/dl/MS-DOS % grep -nri 'brain[ -]damage' . ./v4.0/src/DOS/STRIN.ASM:70:; Brain-damaged TP ignored ^F in case his BIOS did not flush the ./v4.0/src/DOS/PATH.ASM:24:; MZ 19 Jan 1983 Brain damaged applications rely on success ./v4.0/src/DOS/FCBIO.ASM:28:; MZ 15 Dec 1983 Brain damaged programs close FCBs multiple ./v4…

Looks as if someone did an s/retarded/brain damaged/g before making the code public :)

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#238

Post by pyb »

jmspring wrote: post #119

My brain is rusty, but I feel like MSDOS 5.11 was where things finally just worked. TSRs, memory managers, etc. Moving a lot and not being a packrat I've lost some of that history. It'd be interesting to see 5.x and 6.x released.

Perhaps you mean DOS 5.0. If I remember well, DOS 6 wasn't different from DOS 5 internally?

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#239

Post by squigz »

pavlov wrote: post #175

When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC. I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since…

Don't be too sad that computers have matured: hackers gunna hack, no matter the generation ;)

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#240

Post by hnthrowaway0328 »

pavlov wrote: post #175

When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC. I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since…

We can still give DOS to kids though. I'm going to try it out when he reaches 6.
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