My first exposure was in high school, where the 386s were actually more or less terminals (no HDD!) booting Windows off a central server, over a BNC network. Logins could take 5 minutes! We used to disconnect the machines off the network and run games off a bootdisk.

16MB on a 286 would be unheard of! Even at the start of the Pentium era, 16MB was for ‘power users’ as 16GB was in 2010.

Microsoft saw that Access Links 386 wouldn’t run properly on Windows, users would need to dip out into proper DOS. They probably thought that a lot of those who would want a golf game would be business users, they ended up buying Access and porting Links to Microsoft Golf. Version 2.0 runs under Windows 3.1x, installs it’s own Win32 runtime and is a pain to try and get running under Virtualisation – it is pernickity about screen drivers (glfmod20.exe errors!), virtual memory and on VirtualBox runs too quickly (the swing meter seemed to be tied to the clock speed of the machine, running a VM on a modern processor is way too quick!). I remember running it on a 486, it was billed as ‘photo realistic’ – the slow draw speed between swings took a few minutes.

A big DOS app I remember at the time was DBase, my uncle used to run it, it was happy being launched as a DOS session from an icon/PIF from Program Manager.

I was thinking of the lawsuits. Win95 depending on DOS for booting helped Caldera drag the lawsuits for years. And DR-DOS 5.0 was released back in 1990!

interesting it comes with windows 1.03 …. I guess it really was going to be OS/2 before there was an OS/2…

Here is one copy that existed, sadly the site is now dead
http://web.archive.org/web/20070403074023/http://www.16bitos.com/410ms.htm

FYI, the main problem with 1.x is that even 1.3 still had many problems, like printer driver support.

And Larry Osterman’s blog says that multitasking DOS was one of the first DOSes to be developed on spec. It was only after it started development that European OEMs began to ask for it.

Yes the key market for DR-DOS was OEMs and even MS knew that. In fact they did not retail MS-DOS until MS-DOS 5.0 was released in 1991.

But also remember the 286 was already announced in early 1983.