29 Jul
2012
29 Jul
'12
5:35 p.m.
On 30 July 2012 00:58, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
I'll take your word - Compaqs were so *very* expensive that we mainly
ran them as servers in those days.
Never heard of these. Probably not sold in Europe or at least the UK.
> MS-DOS
2.21 and 3.31 were the ones with the most system specific
> customization, such as different versions of MODE.COM , etc.
On Mon, 30 Jul
2012, Liam Proven wrote:
The only 3.31 I met was Compaq DOS 3.31, which as
you say removed the
32MB disk partition restriction. It ran on anything, of course.
Except that it's MODE.COM (.EXE? (gotta check a copy sometime, and see
what the first two bytes are!)) contained [EGA,CGA] options that are
inapplicable for video boards other than the Compaq ones (that had an
internal and an external video). Certainly wouldn't hurt to run it on
other machines. But not all
vendors offered a 3.31 - it was a special Compaq thing.
AFAICR Amstrad never did.
Also Morrow? Zenith??
Very very rare; I think I only ever saw 2 or 3 of the subnotebooks,
the only machines unique enough to be worth the import cost.
Did HP?
Also eye-wateringly expensive & thus rare.
We sold AST, IBM, Viglen, Apricot, lots of Amstrads - the 1st cheap PC
clones in the UK & also big in Germany under the Schneider brand, I
believe.
I've run into a few others (certainly not as many
as 2.21 machine
specific),
Before my time, TBH.
but can't list them right now.
Admittedly, vendors without any "non-standard" hardware had no reason to
have one.
Amstrad h/w was /very/ nonstandard but I don't think they adapted DOS
to handle it - that was a matter for GEM or for DOS apps to use.
E.g. Amstrad CGA machines could use 16 colours in 320*200 mode, & the
EGA ones had a 640*350*16 mode IIRC.
Horrible plastic machines, mind. Reared on PS/2, I hated 'em.
--
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