6 Jun
2013
6 Jun
'13
10:30 a.m.
On Thu, 6 Jun 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
Personally I use 3.3 or 6.2 whenever I need DOS.
3.31 has partition > 32M support that 3.30 does not.
3.31 is not available in PC-DOS, and in MS-DOS only from specific OEMs.
(2.11 and 3.31 were the most heavily customized, albeit most of the
customizations were very specific to special hardware and the MODE.COM)
6.20, 6.21, 6.22 were the same other than disk compression
One of my students patched a copy of 6.22 for the Humane Society
to become MY-DOG 6.22, including chainging the boot message from
"Starting MS-DOS" to "WALKING MY DOG"
<OB_NIT_RANT>
There is no "3.3" nor "6.2", nor "3.2", "3.1",
"2.1", etc.
Internally, WHERE IT MATTERS, 3.30 is three point THIRTY
6.20 is six point TWENTY.
DOS versions were ALWAYS a number, then a period ("full stop", not
a decimal point - it was a separator, not a floating point number),
then a TWO DIGIT DECIMAL number!
PLEASE, In DEBUG, type:
A
MOV AH, 30
INT 21
INT 3
[Enter]
G
now look at the displayed AX
3.30 will put 3 in register AL and thirty (1Eh) in AH
3.31 will put 3 in register AL and thirty-one (1Fh) in AH
6.20 will put 6 in register AL and twenty (14h) in AH
6.21 will put 6 in register AL and twenty-one (15h) in AH
6.22 will put 6 in register AL and twenty-two (16h) in AH
I used to assign, "Write your own VER program, [discussion of function
30h] . . . and try it on the machines in the lab" (not all of which
were PC-DOS 3.30)
One student used function 9 to print "MS-DOS version 3.3"
What grade should I have given him?
My copy of 4.01 (presented to me as "four point one" by a former
student who went to Microsoft) put 4 in AL and 0 in AH. But it had
"issues"
Some 4.xx issues were real, SOME WEREN'T. The most heavily talked about
"ISSUE" was, "4 won't run Norton Utilities!", meaning that Norton
Futilities didn't understand the >32M drive structures.
</OB_NIT_RANT>
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com