13 Mar
2001
13 Mar
'01
4:12 a.m.
On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Wayne M. Smith wrote:
Looked through a bunch of disks and the earliest
version of MS-DOS I could find was 1.13.
Which OEM is your 1.13?
SOME of the differences from one OEM to another can prevent successfully
using one company's MS-DOS on another's products, but most of the
differences won't matter much.
Prior to 5.00, MS-DOS was [theoretically] only available from the OEM
manufacturer, although there was no shortage of gray-market copies.
From one manufacturer's version to another, there
will be some minor
differences in IO.SYS (for support of other drive types, etc.),
and
MODE.COM will be different. In some cases there may also be some changes
in FORMAT.COM
For example: Gavilan supported 8 and 16 line LCD screens and 3.5" drives
with their own unique format before IBM (PC-DOS 3.20). Their IO.SYS and
MODE.COM reflect those differences.
BTW, 2.11 and 3.31 seem to be the most heavily customized versions.
1.25 seems to be an MS-DOS version of PC-DOS 1.10
By the time that 5.00 came out (5/91), MS-DOS machines that weren't
completely compatible (ie: had any traces of originality) had been largely
driven out of the market.
--
Fred Cisin cisin(a)xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
PO Box 1236 (510) 558-9366
Berkeley, CA 94701-1236