19 Sep
2006
19 Sep
'06
12:40 a.m.
On 9/18/2006 at 5:56 PM Fred Cisin wrote:
First official support for 3.5" in PC-DOS was
V3.20.
First official support for 3.5" in MS-DOS (OEM'd) was V2.11.
A few machines added support for 3.5" on their own (HP, Gavilan, etc.)
Any DOS (PC or MS) could support 720K with a DEVICE= driver after version
2.0. And if you were lucky enough to have the Microsoft OEM tech
bulletins, you could do it with DOS 1.x. As a matter of fact, didn't
Godbout initially offer support for PC-DOS by taking a stock $40 copy of
PC-DOS 1.0/1.1 and supplying his own IBMBIO.COM/IO.SYS? I seem to recall
some elaborate ritual with it.
I still have the OEM customization guides for MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.00. The
preface to 2.00 states that eventually it would support the entire set of
Xenix functions. Uh-huh.
But there was a glorious mixup in PC/MS 720K formats. I'm not sure, but
I think they even used different media bytes.
One could in PC-DOS 3.?0 use DRIVPARM in CONFIG.SYS but you had to suffix
the DRIVPARM with a string of control-A's.
Several versions of Windoze FORMAT (COMMAND LINE!)
support /T:80/N:8
which gives a 640K format!
/F:x support seems to have been dropped completely.
AFAIK, the code's still in the kernel driver, but FORMAT's just gotten
dumb, probably intentionally. And if you hook up a 360K 5.25" drive and
set the BIOS up for it, XP still won't format the blasted thing, although
it'll read and write just fine.
I think MS would love to kill off floppy support entirely.
Cheers,
Chuck