9 Sep
2020
9 Sep
'20
12:59 p.m.
>> Date and time of Command.com and any other DOS
files will identify the
>> version number.
On Wed, 9 Sep 2020, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
Only after DOS 5 or so, I fear.
By lookup of the date prior to 5.00; starting with 5.00, visible instead
of accurate dates
Oh dear, yes. If the machine is not totally vanilla
but close enough
to boot vanilla DOS, then it's possible that SPEEDISK could have run
but incorrectly and mangled stuff. Similarly running DOS defraggers on
a VFAT disk with LFNs would mangle them, in the Win95 era.
That is very worrisome.
TBH, though, I'm surprised -- later versions of
DOS (such as 6.22)
didn't run on DOS compatible machines, because they'd died out by
then. It was IBM compatible or nothing by the DOS 6 era, IIRC. So I'd
expect a later-era machine to be compatible enough that Norton etc.
would have no problem.
various levels of "IBM compatible".
PCWorld (1983?) did a test of "compatibles", and misused Xenocopy as "the
acid test", using a very early "REAL IBM PC ONLY" version of the program
that my publisher (may they rot in pieces) had insisted on for trying to
peddle to IBM. By the time of the PCWorld article, RELEASE VERSIONS of
XenoCopy ran on anything that had reasonable INT13h, INT1EH, and INT10h
compatibility.