New answers tagged ms-dos
0
I haven’t tried VirtualBox for this, but DOSBox runs the installer fine:
copy all the files on the installation disks to a single installation directory, e.g. ELINST (in a temporary directory) — you’ll end up with ELFISH.PKD, INFO.EXE, INSTALL.EXE, INSTALL.PRG, and READ.ME, along with a DATA subdirectory containing 122 files;
start DOSBox in ELINST’s parent ...
2
At the time where new capabilities came, the market was very fragmented.
It was the 80486 era.
Some PCs had low end graphic cards that couldn't do anything (like Tridents, etc) and the top of the line, at that time, was the ET4000 from Tseng Labs.
A common problem is that you couldn't access the whole video memory at once, but by segments. Also, on some ...
11
Yes, there were, even though AF became available rather late in the day for DOS games (1996). However AF was never successful or even really relevant.
In the nineties, supporting graphics resolutions beyond those defined by VGA was complex; see Fractint’s source code for evidence of that. Some programs had driver interfaces (notably, AutoCAD and Windows), ...
-1
I'd venture the opinion that "it's simply the Unix way". From what I'd read, the file system was one of the first parts of the system to be designed. Unix tends to put in the file system things which, on other systems, tend to be elsewhere. For example, devices (and their drivers) appear as special files, where metadata in the inode identifies the actual ...
-2
While CHDIR .. usefulness is obvious, i.e. go to the parent directory, CHDIR . is a bit confusing since it does nothing but switching to the same directory the user is already in.
Sometimes one needs to do a CHDIR . - for example, if the current directory is deleted (by another process, usually) and the recreated, the OS doesn't know where you are until you ...
4
The . entry exists in MS-DOS because it was copied from Unix.
In Unix, it serves the purpose of supplying a name to the current working directory. If we want to traverse the current working directory, we need to pass something to the opendir function:
DIR *d = opendir(".");
The dot is also useful for executing programs that are in a relative path. For ...
2
In many file systems, having the 'dot' (.) directory as referring to the current directory is necessary to determine the name of the current directory.
In UNIX file systems as well as the FAT file systems used in DOS, the names of files and directories are stored as tuples in the parent directory, as opposed to file systems like NTFS where the name is a ...
0
CD distribution media is difficult/expensive to make unique. I once worked on a very low-volume product. We devised a technique to make the CD "proof of purchase" i.e. baked the product key into a unique CD which could not be copied.
What we did:
Our technique relied on burning a writable CD and then making a small scratch on the label side at a fairly ...
9
Another use of the dot that I think has not been mentioned is that it allows you to specify what executable to use and tells the OS to not search the PATH. If I type (DOS or Unix)
pdflatex
then the OS will search for an executable named like that, starting with the current directory and then those listed in the PATH variable.
But if you type (in DOS; ...
-3
The contrarian view is that the use of "." to represent the current directory is not a necessary feature, and is not really a "feature" at all. Rather, it is a legacy of unsophisticated command-line parsers that we simply became stuck with as mostly an accident of history.
All early disk operating systems relied on a command line to interact with the ...
29
It simply makes sense to have a symbol that stands for the current directory. It makes sense for the symbol to be easy to type and to stand out from ordinary directory names. Dot is a pretty good choice. It makes learning a lot easier if the same symbol means the same thing in multiple contexts. consider the following:
chdir .\subdir
copy c:\test\*.* .
...
13
CHDIR . is a bit confusing since CHDIR produces the exact same result and both in fact are pretty much a no-op.
Not really, not even at first sight, as (under MS-DOS) chdir prints out the current directory, while chdir . does not. Of course, this may vary depending on the OS in use. For example under Unix, neither cd . nor cd produce anything but a linefeed....
4
At least in MS-DOS, when a new directory is created, it is first populated with two special entries, .. which points to parent directory where it was created from, and . which points to itself. It is possible that being currently in some directory just means keeping a pointer to a directory, and absolute path name can be get by just following the .. entries ...
7
Different versions of MS-DOS and Windows shipped with different versions of HIMEM.SYS:
Windows 3.0: HIMEM.SYS 2.60
MS-DOS 5.0: HIMEM.SYS 2.77
Windows 3.1: HIMEM.SYS 3.07
MS-DOS 6.2 and later, Windows for Workgroups 3.11: HIMEM.SYS 3.10
(See KB74977 and KB84388 for some of these.)
I don’t have details off-hand of all the changes between these versions, but ...
13
The XMS specification is still accurate: functions 0x10 and 0x11 provide access to UMBs. However, the specification doesn’t decide where those functions are implemented.
On its own, HIMEM.SYS does indeed only provide access to memory above 1MiB, i.e. the HMA (so it also controls the A20 line) and extended memory (which it makes available as XMS). If you ...
0
It's a first generation, first party piece of primary hardware for the IBM PC, before anyone even started thinking about offering additional video adaptors for the platform. Video was laid out in the system specs as being addressible at a certain set of addresses depending on the type of adaptor - and, indeed, it's something you set up using DIP switches on ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
