On 27 September 2017 at 20:25, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Sep 2017, Liam Proven wrote:
>>
>> ... as usual, lots of high-quality info. Can't disagree with any of it.
>
>
> thanks. many errors, due to inadequately refreshed dynamic wet-ware RAM
> Chuck will probably notice most of them.
:-)
>> Vanilla PC-DOS and MS-DOS didn't get past 3.3, TTBOMK.
>
>
> My turn to nit-pick.
>
> There never was ANY version 3.3 !
> And certainly no three point three!
> You mean version 3 point THIRTY! (3.30)
Oh, OK.
Honestly, as a holder of a battered dusty old science degree, the
number _after_ the decimal is only used digit-by-digit. It's never
three point thirty, it's three point three zero, and that is
equivalent to three point three.
> 3.30 gave an AX of 1E03 ("three point thirty")
> 3.31 gave an AX of 1F03 ("three point thirty-one")
> 2.10 gave an AX of 0A02 ("two point ten")
> 2.11 gave an AX of 0B02 ("two point eleven")
> "three point three" would be AX of 0303, and would be 3.03
Makes me wince, but I defer.
> How about ZENITH?
Never saw them here. Virtually a US-only company AFAIK.
> Were the tweaks done BY Compaq, or by Compaq and Microsoft, in preparation
> for support in later versions of DOS?
Don't know.
> 3.31 was only available as OEM versions of MS-DOS. There was no PC-DOS
> 3.31.
AIUI, yes.
> Some OEMs had enhancements.
So I heard, I think. Long time ago. Don't think I ever _saw_ any myself.
> 2.11 (0B02) was another version that was ONLY OEMs, often with some very
> strange changes/enhancements, such as support for odd drives such as 3.5"
> (not supported mainstream until 3.20 (1403)), MODE for switching between
> internal/external video and 8 or 16 line internal displays (Gavilan 2.11),
> etc.
> BTW, Gavilan started (NCC 1983) with 3.0" drive, then single sided 3.5"
> (SA300), and about the time that Gavilan destroyed itself (1985), they had
> double sided 3.5" (SA350). Gavilan 3.5" double sided disk formats were
> different from PC-DOS 3.5" formats until Gavilan 2.11K (unofficially
> released after Gavilan was GONE.) In converting a Gavilan to 720K, to get a
> clean look, transfer the bezel from a Gavilan SA300 to a stock SA350.
> Gavilan was one of MANY early laptops, a full year later than Grid Compass,
> but Gavilan appears likely to have been the first to use the term "laptop".
Before my time, I'm afraid.
I came in at 3.20 -- as in some old machines still had it.
In the UK, PCs were too expensive for most people except wealthy
businesses until Amstrad launched the PC 1512 and 1640.
So the clone industry happened in the UK after 1986.
> PC-DOS 4.00 (0004) was "buggy". "The new DOS is so buggy that Norton
> Utilities won't work!" How many of those "bugs" were simply CHANGES that
> Norton fUtilities and the like were not prepared for?
> PC-DOS 4.01 was supposedly "fixed" (think in a veterinary context?).
> I had a copy of PC-DOS 4.01 that returned 0004! "ALL bugs fixed?"
Famously so. :-)
I didn't study internal version numbers, though.
> Prior to 5.00 (0005), MS-DOS was "only for sale with a computer, or as
> upgrade to such". In THEORY, it was not available for retail sale, but
> there was a GIANT grey market, with no difficulty at all finding and buying
> copies. There was NO apparent effort by Microsoft to rein in the gray
> market.
Yup.
DR-DOS changed that.
First version, 3.41 (?), very minor. Never saw it.
DR-DOS 5 though was a huge hit. We sold loads. I liked it. Preferred it, even.
> 5.00 was the first version with a RETAIL channel. It was ten years after
> IBM and Microsoft signed - their contract obviously permitted Microsoft
> selling to OEMs, but was there a clause in their contract that forbade
> RETAIL sales [for ten years]?
Only because MS gazed upon DR's sales and became (even more) covetous.
> BTW, "PC-DOS" was "descriptive" ("Personal Computer Disk Operating System"),
> and was NOT a trademark. I personally confirmed that in the stacks of the
> Patent nadTrademark Office in Virginia in 1987.
(!!)
> At least until after DRI brought "Concurrent PC-DOS" to market.
> IBM was not amused.
> http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/googleglassuspto.pdf
> "MS-DOS", however WAS trademarked.
No flies on MS.
> SETVER (starting with 5.00) was even more fun.
> Prior to that, one of the early assignments that I gave my Assembly Language
> class was to modify EXE2BIN (our copy which came with PC-DOS 2.00 and the
> IBM release of MASM 1.0, was locked to DOS 2.00) to be DOS version tolerant.
See my comment to Alison -- I need to wrangle that now for PC DOS 7.1.
> There was another, even more bizarre way to handle large drives, even larger
> than 512MB!
> In DOS 3.10 (0A03), they introduced the [undocumented?] "network
> redirector". Remember MSCDEX?
> 3.10 had the 32MB limit. But, a CD-ROM was 2/3 GB (about 660MB). They
> handled it with smoke and mirrors. If you tried to CHKDSK a CD-ROM
> CHKDSK D:
> It returned an error message:
> "You can not CHDSK a network drive"!
> I saw that used for large hard drives, but I don't remember ever seeing a
> COMMERCIAL product to do it.
I _think_ I heard about that but never saw it.
> OB_Terminology:
> IBM called the motherboard a "system board" or a "planar board", at least
> partially due to repeated use of "mother_____" in a Black Panther speech
> broadcast from Merritt College.
> They thought that "HARD disk" would make it sound difficult to use, so they
> called it a "FIXED disk" (think in a veterinary context)
Ah well yes. Planars and DASDs and IPLing, oh my.
IBM is huge and growing in Brno. Lot of my friends work there.
But I fear the company is circling the drain and will die off in time.
Maybe Micro Focus, my now employer, will buy them in time? They're the
emperors of legacy stuff. Just acquired all HPE's legacy software.
--
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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