Comments on: It was 30 years ago today…

By: neozeed

neozeed — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 20:39:14 +0000

In reply to Yuhong Bao. Ah that's the post I was thinking of! it sure is some interesting stuff!

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 20:00:30 +0000

“It must be the infamous machine that was the only one that could link the linker as 640kb of ram just wasn’t enough… Well not until they went all DPMI.”
Actually it is said in the article right here:
http://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/2007/11/first-dos-machine.html

By: neozeed

neozeed — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 15:21:54 +0000

Talk about backwards compatibility!

I also like how MS-DOS 1.25 from the same archive booting on the 8086 monitor also has about 1MB free ram. It must be the infamous machine that was the only one that could link the linker as 640kb of ram just wasn’t enough… Well not until they went all DPMI.

By: Michal Necasek

Michal Necasek — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 09:01:44 +0000

Actually, I had a bit of a shocker yesterday. I downloaded the 86-DOS file archive on my Windows machine (32-bit Windows 2003 Server) just to see what’s in there. There were a few .COM executables and some assembly sources. Now, the shocking part is that the 86-DOS executables actually run on Windows 2003! I did not expect that. The executables can’t be used easily because they only understand floppies, but it’s a good proof that MS-DOS is indeed 86-DOS (not that there was any doubt).