9 Aug
2004
9 Aug
'04
5:23 a.m.
Vintage Computer Festival <vcf(a)siconic.com> wrote:
First of all, a pure DOS computer is a VERY handy tool
to have around.
MS-DOS is really a program loader, which is actually extremely important
since PCs do not come with monitor program.
SUNs come with the Forth boot ROM which is arguably far more useful than
MSDOS, but not very popular. For this reason you won't see anything like
MSDOS for SUNs.
I have a VMware VM running MSDOS with network support and I use this
to compile TurboC programs (for some reason the tcc linker does not run
in a Windows 2000, or later DOS box, it does run on MS-DOS-based systems
like Windows 95/98/ME).
I also find the lack of any amount of resource management by MSDOS to be
invaluable for writing programs that explore the behaviour of hardware
systems (e.g. HP-IB devices).
Of course, I wouldn't use such a system for any real work :-) I am amazed
that people actually did so.
**vp