On 01/01/2016 01:35 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
Another way, starting with PC/MS-DOS 3.10 was using MSCDEX, or equivalent. I think that there used to be some very strange patches around to let a hard drive impersonate a CD-ROM. A CD-ROM (2/3 G) was not a local drive to the OS! It was presented as being a "drive-like" object on a network. That is a VERY LOCAL area network.
It really was amazing how quickly hard drive sizes overran system vendors' expectations. You'd think that system software authors would anticipate very large drives right from the start. But stumbling along with 16MB, then 32MB drive size limits just illustrates how backward-thinking folks were. CP/M 2.2 had, what, an 8MB hard drive limit initially? That was backward even for 1980.
And then you get a surprise every once in awhile. I was incredulous that one of my "devices" had a limit of 2GB on a CF drive, but the thing actually understood a DOS partition table. So you could take a 4GB or more drive, partition off the first 2GB and you're still gold. Can't swap partitions--the thing just takes the first one in the table, but still pretty surprising.
--Chuck
