Hi, On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 9:21 PM, Ralf A. Quint <free...@gmx.net> wrote: > At 04:48 PM 9/17/2012, Karen Lewellen wrote: > >>Granted, I am a media professional, so facts especially n the Internet >>are important. >>the fact is ms dos 7.1 under wind 98 had fat 32, even Dr dos in 99 has it. > > The fact is that there never was a "MS-DOS 7.1", it just happened > that the underlying DOS mode of Windows 95B intensified itself with > that version. As mentioned, MS-DOS 6.22 was the last official version > of MS-DOS.
(I hate legalese, so I dislike bringing this up, but ...) Again, this was purely marketing, not technical, as MS wanted to exclusively bundle their DOS with Windows. With (very creaky) shims, DR-DOS was said to be able to boot Win95 (and proved such in court), but no such patches were ever officially released. MS didn't really want to encourage competitor DOSes to run Windows. On a semi-related note, I think you can boot Win 3.x inside DOSEMU, DOSBox, etc. Even Mike Chambers' Fake86 can (mostly) boot it. There may even be some experimental support on some of those for booting Win9x, but since that's uninteresting to me, I've never delved deeper. (While I don't personally care for Windows, I do wish FreeDOS had 100% Windows-friendly internals compatibility, but it's not the end of the world, I guess. We'd need more developers to test anyways, and old Windows aren't exactly easily found [or worth the money, perhaps].) > And DR-DOS never officially supported FAT32 either, the last version > of "DR-DOS" was 6.0, released in 1991, followed by Novell DOS 7.0 in > December 1993. > Any FAT32 support for it only exists in some 3party support for an > unofficially maintained version of the later Caldera OpenDOS 7.x... Caldera / Lineo / DeviceLogics / DR-DOS Inc. were the ones selling 7.03 (finalized circa late 1998, early 1999), which I bought online some years ago. Indeed, it lacked any "kernel" functionality regarding LFNs or FAT32, hence you were limited to 8 GB (four primary FAT16 partitions of 2 GB each). And BTW, IIRC that would be 16 kb clusters, which is incredibly wasteful, blech. MS-DOS / Win9x forced you to install in the very beginning of the hard drive. DR-DOS can install in subsequent partitions but has some weird limit regarding mounting and seeing previous partitions. FreeDOS is the most flexible in that it can see and use anything. (But I've not tested all the billions of other DOS variants!) So it's not like MS-DOS is perfect, but obviously it was the target most people wrote for in ye olde days. Different DOSes also have different speed and overall RAM requirements, among billions of other details (mostly inconsequential unless you're a trivia buff), though I admit I don't have any concrete details offhand. ;-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
