Yousuf Khan wrote:

I've been trying to remember this, and I honestly can't remember it
anymore. In MS-DOS, where were the standard external commands located?
The only thing I remember about MS-DOS was that the command.com was
located in the root directory (along with autoexec.bat, config.sys, and
the hidden files msdos.sys & io.sys). Slightly different names for the
PC-DOS version, such as pcdos.sys & ibmio.sys, but otherwise identical.
The standard external commands were those like chkdsk or xcopy, which
weren't built into the command.com. Was there an MSDOS folder or
something which contained these commands?

Before there was a hard drive (and using 5 1/4" floppies for instance),
the external commands were on the floppy disk, Yousuf. If you needed
one of those commands you had to have the floppy in the drive.

The internal commands were in memory and available without the floppy in
the drive. They were loaded at boot up time.

If you had two floppy drives and wanted to do a diskcopy from A: to B:
you had to have the DOS floppy inserted in a drive (A: was convenient
because you could dispense with the path because you had booted up from
A: and A: was part of the prompt), and execute diskcopy A: B: and the
command (now copied into memory) would pause to allow removing the DOS
floppy and inserting a floppy into A: (and B: for that matter).

Those, of course, were the good old days.

TomT