Why DOS ?

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.centos.org/HowTos/KVM) and Xen (https://www.xenproject.org/) and maybe others. The actual virtual machine is QEMU (https://www.qemu.org/) in both cases. QEMU is also available on Windows. On Windows though VirtualBox is probably nicer and easier to work with. Machines can also easily be transferred between those systems. So you can create a virtual machine using VirtualBox and afterwards move it to Linux under KVM/Qemu or Xen/Qemu or you can start it using Windows Qemu.

The first 10 minute exercise

Preparing the virtual machine (assuming VirtualBox)

Start up the VirtualBox GUI. Create a new machine. When you type in a name like "MS-DOS", it will automatically populate machine type, recommended memory setting and so on.


Virtualbox - Creation step 1

Click your way through. The last step will be the disk creation.

Virtualbox - Creation last step

In the end you will see a new entry in your list of virtual machines.

Virtualbox - Creation done - new machine ready

Starting up the first time

Double click this entry to start up the still empty DOS virtual machine. It will offer to bootstrap from a CD/DVD image file or the physical CD/DVD drive. As DOS was distributed on floppy disks, just cancel the CD boot option.


As a result you will obviously find yourself with a non-bootable machine. The VM behaves identical to a physical computer without any operating system. Therefore no surprise here.


End of the first exercise

Bootstrapping the DOS machine will be covered in an upcoming blog post. Therefore for the time being, just shut the machine down using the menu sequence "File" -> "Close".


For the moment this is it. Sometimes I have to do some real work on modern OSs. So stay tuned for the bootstrapping piece. Once the bootstrapping is done, I will gradually turn more and more features of this DOS machine on until we end up with some serious machine.

Other people do this as well

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Install-DOS-622-Under-VirtualBox/


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