DOS is still possible

Making DOS network ready When I described how to add the first set of useful drivers, I already indicated that networking is also possible on MS-DOS machines. Actually when you look at today's network configuration settings (at least until Windows 7), you can easily spot the similarities to the very first network implementations on Microsoft operating systems. During this exercise, we will make use of the CD-ROM driver that was installed in the first driver session. You will need the following ISO-image, which contains all the MS-DOS related networking content that was previously available directly from Microsoft. Download link Microsoft-LAN-DOS.iso How to add networking to DOS Save the ISO image above to a place on your machine where VirtualBox runs. Start the MS-DOS Virtualbox. Insert the ISO-file into the VirtualBox virtual CD-ROM drive. Examine what is on the ISO image. To do that, switch to the command prompt if DOSshell is running. dir dir x:\ This should show yo

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