AW: CGA card (Mitsubishi Electric) with 192K RAM?

[Fred Cisin]

>>> 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.