Bit of a historical question: MS-DOS

On Sat, 02 Jun 2012 16:36:13 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

On Sat, 2 Jun 2012 16:17:25 -0700, "Gene E. Bloch"
wrote:

On Sat, 02 Jun 2012 13:37:29 -0600, GreyCloud wrote:

In my experiences with MS-DOS, I've never seen 4dos.exe. The only thing
that I saw was command.com... msdos.sys & io.sys.

Because you didn't buy and install 4dos.

It was an independent product.

It was a *wonderful* product (although I can hardly remember the
details of it, I remember liking it very much). But I do remember once
writing a batch file of about 4000 lines!

That is a big batch of code :-)

I never used 4DOS, so I don't know nothin'.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

On 6/3/2012 3:36 PM PT, Yousuf Khan typed:

Remember DOS Shell?

Yes, but I never used it, by that point I was already using DOS for
several years and I was already familiar with the command-line.

Ah.
--
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On Sun, 03 Jun 2012 21:12:37 GMT (DK) wrote
in Message id: :

TC has no real competition at this point.

I haven't tried TC, but I like and use Xplorer2, which seems to have the
same features.

In message , David H. Lipman
writes:
[]
They couldn't all be in the root as there was a limit of 64 files in the root.

(Yes, but were there 64 of them?)

ISTR being told that the limit was 100, and am now wondering whether
your 64 was in hex. (which comes out as 100); however, others have
posted more comprehensive lists of limits for various media, and I
couldn't see 100 (or 64) in them.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you. -Richard

In message , Yousuf Khan
writes:
On 03/06/2012 2:28 AM, DK wrote:
In ,
wrote:
On 6/2/2012 8:54 PM PT, Ant typed:

Nah, we haven't touched QEMM, Extended vs. Expanded RAM ;-)

No no! XMS, EMS, conventional memory (EVIL!!), config.sys, autoexec.bat,
etc.

Oh remember, DoubleSpace, Stacker, etc.?

I do. Stacker was absolutely great!

But DoubleSpace was horrible. I lost a lot of data due to that one.

Yousuf Khan
Basically, it put all your files into one file, didn't it? So you could
lose it/them all at once if that file got corrupted. And yet, people
continue to use email (and possibly news) software that does that (for
emails), ...

Actually, is there _any_ email software (XP, 7, or even '9x) that stores
each email as a separate real file? (In real folders/directories?)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you. -Richard

In message , Ken Blake
writes:
On Fri, 1 Jun 2012 17:26:07 -0400, "glee"
wrote:

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
...
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?

Yousuf Khan

As I recall, the default location for MS-DOS (at least v. 5 and 6.x) was
at C:\DOS


That's what I remember too, but at my age, I don't trust my memory g

Perhaps it needs replacing ... mine certainly does (-:
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you. -Richard

In message , John Williamson
writes:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 01/06/2012 4:57 PM, David H. Lipman wrote:
From: "Yousuf

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
[]
However it was always located in the PATH (%PATH%).
Yeah, I know it was always available in the path, but was there a
default directory created to hold these commands? For some reason I'm
thinking that there may have been a C:\SYS or SYSTEM folder or
something? Or were they all placed into C:\ the root directory?

IME, the closest to a default was C:\DOS. Hold on a second, I'll check.

I'll second that.

Sounds of distant rummaging. Sounds of cursing as many crates are
lifted and moved. Finds and starts DOS 5 based Toshiba T3200mains
powered "portable". Lights throughout the area go dim as the EGA
orange plasma screen lights up.

Loved the description!

Blimey, it still works. Now *there's* a blast from the past. Tasword...

Indeed - though I don't remember what it was: a word processor?

Yup. C:\DOS on the default DOS 5.0 installation, with Windows 3.0 in
C:\WINDOWS, and the extra Toshiba goodies in C:\TOSHIBA.

--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you. -Richard

On 04/06/2012 14:24, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , John Williamson

Sounds of distant rummaging. Sounds of cursing as many crates are
lifted and moved. Finds and starts DOS 5 based Toshiba T3200mains
powered "portable". Lights throughout the area go dim as the EGA
orange plasma screen lights up.

Loved the description!

Bows :-)


Blimey, it still works. Now *there's* a blast from the past. Tasword...

Indeed - though I don't remember what it was: a word processor?

It was. I assume it would still work, if I had an Epson compatible
printer to go with the computer. I've also got a copy of Borland Sprint
which should still install, assuming the floppies are okay, which was my
preferred DOS wordprocessor.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

On Mon, 4 Jun 2012 14:17:35 +0100, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

In message , David H. Lipman
writes:
[]
They couldn't all be in the root as there was a limit of 64 files in the root.

(Yes, but were there 64 of them?)

ISTR being told that the limit was 100, and am now wondering whether
your 64 was in hex. (which comes out as 100); however, others have
posted more comprehensive lists of limits for various media, and I
couldn't see 100 (or 64) in them.

64.

You should expect numbers that have a lot of zeros in binary, as 64
decimal does (1000000), not numbers with few zeros in binary, such as
100 decimal (1100100). Such numbers match the hardware better.

It was 100 octal, actually.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

On 04/06/2012 9:20 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Yousuf Khan
writes:
On 03/06/2012 2:28 AM, DK wrote:
I do. Stacker was absolutely great!

But DoubleSpace was horrible. I lost a lot of data due to that one.

Yousuf Khan
Basically, it put all your files into one file, didn't it? So you could
lose it/them all at once if that file got corrupted. And yet, people
continue to use email (and possibly news) software that does that (for
emails), ...

Yup, not that I knew that at the time when first installing it. I just
assumed that Microsoft knew what it was doing when it created DoubleSpace.

Actually, is there _any_ email software (XP, 7, or even '9x) that stores
each email as a separate real file? (In real folders/directories?)

Thunderbird keeps all of its newsgroup messages in separate files. But
email is kept in a single file.

Yousuf Khan