[BC] any DOS fanatics out there?

[Kevin Tekel]

Steve Ordinetz wrote:
> I'd read long ago that 4.0 was pretty bad, 5 not much better.  I think
> I had a machine once with 4.0 in it...don't recall any problems with
> it.  What was the problem with those versions of DOS?

DOS 4.00 added FAT-16 to support hard drive partitions larger than 32 MB,
but was very buggy and was a memory hog.  They quickly fixed most of the
bugs in 4.01 but it was still a memory hog, so most people kept using DOS
3.3.  (Compaq released their own DOS 3.31 with FAT-16 in the meantime.)

DOS 5.0 added memory management for 386+ machines (the familiar HIMEM.SYS
and EMM386.EXE) to free up conventional memory, and gave us a good full-
screen text editor (EDIT) and a simplified version of Microsoft's
QuickBasic (QBASIC).  The DOS emulation that is built into Windows 2000
and XP is still based upon DOS 5.0.



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