5 ms·
My brain is rusty, but I feel like MSDOS 5.11 was where things finally just worked. TSRs, memory managers, etc. Moving a lot and not being a packrat I've lost
by jmspring 2y ago
My brain is rusty, but I feel like MSDOS 5.11 was where things finally just worked. TSRs, memory managers, etc. Moving a lot and not being a packrat I've lost some of that history.
It'd be interesting to see 5.x and 6.x released.
- ListenLinda 2y agoI think it was 3.3x where things started working. I don't recall 4.x being around much. I do remember 5 and 6. For some reason 4 never made a splash in my circle of friends.
- lproven 2y ago4 was, TBH, appalling for its time. It took more base memory than ever. It had a complicated code page system that most people didn't want, and a clunky early version of IBM DOSShell that was scorned although it grew into something useful. But it supported disk partitions over 32MB, and for that reason, it was reluctantly adopted. If you had a 286 or 386, then there were measures that you could take with a memory manager to make it not so bad, but on 8088/8086 class hardware, it didn't leave enough free memory for many big apps to run.
- jagged-chisel 2y agoIIRC 6.22 was the pinnacle of MS-DOS, with all the comfort and niceties one could expect at the time. Then began the Windows era.
- userbinator 2y agoI think the pinnacle goes to MS-DOS 7.1, which while bundled with Windows was also usable as a DOS by itself and contained features like FAT32 support. MS-DOS 8 was the last version that came with the ill-fated Windows Me and significantly neutered.
- jmspring 2y ago6.22 would likely be what I was remembering.
- Zardoz84 2y agoI had good memories of DR-DOS 5
- billforsternz 2y agoI was kind of happy with MSDOS 2.11, I felt that they'd got the basics in place (in particular hard disk / subdirectory support) and that bloat hadn't started. From memory I used this for years and years although I was young so time didn't rush past so quickly so who really knows. I kept a version of MSDOS 2.11 debug.com around for decades (patched with itself so it wouldn't just do a version check then quit). From memory it was something like 12K bytes whereas debug.exe from MSDOS 6.x was more like 60K bytes.
- lproven 2y ago> My brain is rusty It is. Because: > but I feel like MSDOS 5.11 was where things finally just worked There was no MS-DOS 5.11. It went 4, 4.01, 5, 6, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22. IBM had a few extra versions as the divorce was occurring at the time.
- cesarb 2y ago> There was no MS-DOS 5.11. There was Windows 3.11 which ran on top of MS-DOS 5.0, the two numbers probably got mixed in their memory.
- Narishma 2y agoThere was also an MS-DOS 2.11.
- lproven 2y agoThere was indeed a Windows 3.11 and the much more common Windows for Workgroups 3.11 which was a profoundly different product (32-bit disk subsystem & 32-bit networking subsystem -- the first time these pillars of Win9x went out into the world.) But neither of them ran on any particular version of DOS. They ran on PC DOS, MS-DOS and DR-DOS -- although Microsoft tried very hard to block the latter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code They ran on DOS 3.3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. There's nothing at all that links them especially to MS-DOS 5.
- pyb 2y agoPerhaps you mean DOS 5.0. If I remember well, DOS 6 wasn't different from DOS 5 internally?