81–90 of 119 posts
Full assembly. Was this the case all the way up to 6.22 ?
I bet at least until the whole .com .exe stuff was sorted out. After .exe was created they finally got more than a single segment in a binary, so they probably we're using C by then for some things at least. I imagine all the .com files were ask even at 6.22 though, because of the 64kb limit of them
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I love it nostalgically (and I actually enjoyed using it back in the days), many people still use some flavor of DOS e.g. in supermarkets and post offices. I believe there is a lot of old hardware that is only compatible with DOS still in use.
In 2006 I worked at a dry-cleaner/laundromat that had its computer system all running on DOS. I remember when the computer died one day, my boss went to the local thrift store and found a computer old enough to just move the drive over and keep things running. I thought it was odd, but it worked great! Kept us from using it to play games :)
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I was telling my coworker the other day to think about how much of our lives we have wasted waiting for status bars to go from 0 to 100%, haha.
On top of it, most of that time was spent between 99% and 100%
Interesting, all sources of MS-DOS 1.25 is just 12K lines of code, including comments. Today, this seems like a pretty small project, and most commercial apps are significantly bigger.
My beta web app probably has more source code than that.. That has me thinking though. I have always wanted to try OS dev but all the stuff I have read says it will take years to get a system that can print hello world but surely it can't take that long to write 12k lines.
A "something that boots" kernel is very small although obviously it doesn't do much. By the time you get to "hello world" the program will have grown but it's still relatively small.
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Did you install qemm ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM ) and use loadhi to try to move software into 'high memory' (where that would only work for some programs)? I spent so many hours of my youth messing with that :) and this is one of those things where built up experience became completely irrelevant over time.
The debugging and problem solving skills will stay with you for life.
> The user manual contains some significant errors. Most of these are due to last minute changes to achieve a greater degree of compatibility with IBM's implementation of MS-DOS (PC DOS). This includes the use of "\" instead of "/" as the path separator, and "/" instead of "-" as the switch character. For transporting of batch files across machines, Microsoft encourages the use of "\" and "/" respectively in the U.S. market. (See DOSPATCH.TXT for how you can overide this. The user guide explains how the end-user can override this in CONFIG.SYS). Both the printer echo keys and insert mode keys have now been made to toggle. The default prompt (this may also be changed by the user with the PROMPT command) has been changed from "A:" to "A>". We apologize for any inconveniences these changes may have caused your technical publications staff.
So MS-DOS almost had Unix-style file separators and argument switches!
Could you run this with any current virtual machine?
There's 86box, based on PCEM; https://github.com/86Box/86Box/ ...it has support for several PC/XT/AT models. If you can get it onto a floppy image, I'm sure it would run it just fine.
There's a bit of a catch-22 there. Technically, you need to be running DOS X.X to create a bootable floppy (real or image) of DOS X.X, as to make a disk bootable you have to type 'SYS A:' from the running DOS to write bootblock onto the floppy and copy over the current IO.SYS MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM.
So, on say.. a modern machine, with no extra third party tools to create the empty bootable floppy image, you'd be hard pushed to do this, as the files in the Repo are just the files and not a floppy image.
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I'd name "Farting around with config.sys and autoexec.bat" among the things I enjoyed the most in my life. That's a pity you can't find a job to be paid for this nowadays...
Once you started moving up the chain with Win3, etc, throw in config.ini and program.ini amongst others. So many painful memories or is that nostalgia.