DOS is still possible

What the heck am I doing here? I mentioned in the very first post, that DOS is not really state of the art any more. It may serve some educational, historic or nostalgia purposes. But as an operating system for every day use it has certainly a negligible market share. I am writing this series as I came across a large pile of old floppy disks somewhere in my basement. I wanted to get rid of them. And I wanted to check what is on there. Any hidden gems? Any long forgotten games? Any cool software that I loved to use in the 80-ies and 90-ies? The situation In the picture below, you will see just the portion of floppy disks that have already been transformed into floppy image files. Another 150 already went to the bin. And yet another 100 is waiting to be imaged. You can see a lot of Microsoft stuff in there, some items from HP and of course many others. I will get to the hidden gems some time later. But at least you get a feeling. Every floppy takes about 1 minute to be i

What we achieved so far Up to now we have bootstrapped a virtual machine with a DOS version (in this example MS-DOS 5). Then we added support for mouse, CD/DVD and we made the machine CPU friendly. But there is more under the hood. Remember, to see what is going on, we commented out the DOSshell start command in our autoexec.bat. Let's put that back in and then check what happens. As can be seen in the small video, the following steps are performed edit autoexec.bat - re-enable DOSshell reboot the virtual machine inside DOSshell click through to QBasic navigate through the QBasic menus return to DOSshell open a command window from within DOSshell return to the DOSshell via exit So we can even do some programming already using QBasic.

Adding initial drivers As mentioned in the previous blog post , this basic DOS machine still has some flaws. One CPU core fully utilized No CDROM / DVD image support We will fix these two now. Let's see how far we get. We might add some more stuff if time permits. As a prerequisite one additional floppy disk image will be needed. This is a custom compilation. The individual pieces are all available somewhere on the Internet for download. So feel free to use alternative sources. Right click the disk image below and save it somewhere on your host machine. DOS Addon floppy First changes to autoexec.bat When you clicked through the full MS-DOS 5 installation without making any adjustment, you will likely have the DOSshell enabled. The automatic startup of DOSshell has been removed in MS-DOS 6.x (as far as I know). Disadvantage of the DOSshell: we cannot see what drivers and programs are loaded during system startup as the result is immediately hidden by the

Bootstrapping DOS inside VirtualBox The biggest challenge with classic OSs like MS-DOS, DR-DOS and so on is the fact that there is no readily available downloadable ISO-image that you could just virtually insert into the virtual CD-tray of VirtualBox . For anything that is just a little bit younger than DOS, you can probably find the CD image file. Even Windows 95 (while still being available on floppy disk) was already distributed on a CD. The second 10 minutes exercise Floppy images - the solution Fortunately there is the concept of floppy disk images as well. These floppy image files can be inserted into the virtual disk drive of VirtualBox in the same way as CD images. The nice thing about that: it gives you the very original visual impression what it looked like, installing DOS on a brand new computer. What is missing though is the typical sound of these classic disk drives. So let's try DOS 5. You need 2 floppy images. Right click these links and choose "Sav

Why DOS? Obviously this is a very valid question and it has been asked many many times. My personal answer: "because we can". Actually there is nothing wrong with using DOS in any of it's flavors. Today I would say it mainly serves educational purposes. You can learn about virtualization and how to run multiple OSs on a single machine . In addition it will teach you how to work your way through a command line and text based configuration files. With modern computers offering all kinds of virtualization techniques it's quite easy to get a perfect DOS or for that matter Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.0, 3.1, Windows for Workgroups machine going. How to start? Get a virtualization software. The easiest to start with on a standard Windows machine (provided it has a little bit of horse power) is probably VirtualBox ( https://www.virtualbox.org/ ). Download, install, you are good to go. On Linux or MacOS you could use VirtualBox as well. Linux also offers  KVM ( https://wiki.c