Modern DOS?

Question

I was wondering, would MS-DOS 6.22 work on a modern PC's architecture? And if so, does anybody know where one could download it? And, has anyone written DOS-based drivers for modern technology (like USB ports), and if so where do you download those? Because lets face it, DOS was the last semi-decent OS Microsoft ever made.

Answer 1

win98SE was the last version of windows that ran on a 'real' dos version... so I guess that the DOS underneath it would work fine on any computer that ran win98.

Beyond that it was all dos emulation on a native Windows core.

So...

dos 7 would handle USB in a sort-of fashion. I guess it would run on a modern PC as well... you'd just have to install win98 and then edit the startup to not start the windows bits on top.

Anyway, 'last semi decent OS'? Not sure that I'd class DOS as semi decent anyway... what with it's limited capacity for memoy addressing and so on. You'd have a machine with multiple Gb of memory and the capacity to address 640k without having to do fiddles to use memory above that range.

Have you thought of going for Linux? I know it's not Microsoft, but underneath it all there is a *real* command line operating system that isn't that hard to skills-transfer from DOS.

Answer 2

"...lets face it, DOS was the last semi-decent OS Microsoft ever made."

LOL! That's because Microsoft didn't make it! They bought DOS, which was a reverse engineer of CP/M. It's funny how Microsoft has managed to be successful without ever producing anything that could honestly be called an innovation. I guess that's what happens when you're handed a monopoly.

Answer 3

Forget that noise. Use DOSBox, a utility that mimicks DOS with lots of options. It's free and stable. dosbox.sourceforge.net, I think it is.