f you really want to run a real old OS, you can go here to run a Java simulation of the ENIAC system, which just celebrated it’s 61st anniversary last week, on Feb. 14th, 2007. It was announced in 1946, and ran for 9 years, until 1955 or so. (I think Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Gary Kildall, etc. were all still unborn at that time.)
I don’t think you could get an OS much older that that!
That’s one of the great advantages (as well as one of the disadvantages) to the x86 IBM-PC clone. I can get a piece of hardware out of my father’s collection of old hardware from old computers that’s 20 years old and, assuming my computer this day can handle the interface, plug it in and use it. I did that the other day with a 5.25" floppy drive from 1987. I then used it to load some software that was just about as old and eventually got it to run just fine (though I did have to use DOSBox for emulation.) So I have 20 years worth of software on my computer, some of which runs just fine natively in WinXP (even if it’s quite old) and the rest I can emulate. Similarly, I can run a Windows 3.1 program today (though again, I might have to play with the emulation in WinXP). I’ve never tried to install any of the old DOS versions into my modern computer, but I bet I could get it to work. The disadvantages to all this flexibility are everything from modern driver issues and DLL hell to having to problems freeing up enough EMS and XMS to run a program from the DOS days at times. I guarantee that I would never try to play something like Wing Commander Privateer natively in DOS these days because I remember what a headache it was to get enough memory free for the game to run. I’ve never figured out how to do it in WinXP without emulation. Similarly, we still have to use a BIOS and configure everything through that. I think I get four BIOS screens these days when I boot–the memory check and drive check screen, the SATA and RAID detect screen, the IRQ and related info screen, and I think one more (I think I get a screen for the video card first, but that’s up and down really quickly.)
The advantage the Mac has is that the software can be written to work perfectly with a smaller amount of hardware. The problem is that you can’t run the older OSes on the newer hardware because Apple simply didn’t put the support there, while a piece of hardware these days still has to be compatible, to some degree, to software written 20 years ago.
This is a bit off-topic, but …
You know, I had the idea that FAT16 couldn’t handle a disk (or partition) larger than 2GB. And my MP3 player, a Rio Forge 512, wouldn’t turn on with my new 4GB SD card in the slot. But when I put it in my laptop and found that it was formatted with FAT32, I reformatted it using FAT16, and not only did it format the entire 4GB card okay (albeit with some huge cluster size, but since I’m only using big ol’ audiobooks and MP3s on it, not little text files, so I don’t really care about wasting up to 64K or 128K, or whatever the cluster size is, per file) my Rio sees all 4GB as well. Which is particularly funny when you consider that it’s only supposed to work with “up to 512MB SD cards.”
Anybody know what’s up – was I just imagining a 2GB limit for FAT16? Was I confusing it with that old BIOS limit that wouldn’t take a hard drive >2GB? I forget.
Yeah, asterion, true enough.
I can run 99.5% (est) of all Mac software anyhow, but that’s because I’ve got four tiers of emulators at my disposal (vMac to run Systems 0.9 thru 7.5 in Mac Plus mode, Basilisk II to run System 7.0.1 through early 8 in Quadra mode, SheepShaver to run 8.6 in PowerPC mode, and the Classic environment for MacOS 9.2.2 only with full integration and networking).
Most Mac folk will only have Classic, and the ones on Intel Macs won’t even have that.
And things like legacy scanners, serial port printers, ADB dongles for copy-protected sw, or nonstandard external SCSI devices with only ancient System 7 extensions as drivers? Not so much. You folks may occasionally have problems with very old and nonstandard plotters and whatnot but not as bad as we do. (Credit where it’s due though: most of my old SCSI storage devices work under OS X. SyQuest, etc)
MS-DOS 3.3 does not recognize the USB ports. Like I said, I have a 3.3 boot disk and I just tried it again, and it didn’t see the USB keyboard or memory stick I had plugged in. AFAIK, no stand-alone version of DOS could ever natively use USB ports. It needs TSR drivers, which (for the most part) don’t exist.
I know it won’t recognize the mouse because ver 3.3 predates mouse.sys (at least it’s not on my disk), and I don’t know if I have any software that old that would use it anyway. Remember, the mouse wasn’t always the ubiquitous input device it is today. An old-school DB9 or PS/2 serial mouse would work as long as the TSR driver is loaded (I know for sure 5.0 came with it, and maybe 4.0), and any parallel port printer should work in a degraded mode, at least.
No, you aren’t imagining it. That limitation has come back to the modern world in the form of flash memory cards; cards up to and including 2GB can be formatted FAT16 and work in pretty much any device that takes them, but cards above 2GB must be formatted in FAT32 and will only work on devices that can use FAT32-formatted cards.
Um … did you read my post? The reason I asked is that I found by experimentation that that’s not true. I formatted a 4GB card as FAT16 and it works fine.
I’ve heard that in certain Asian countries you can buy (for next to nothing), bootleg DVDs that have every version of MS’s operating systems from DOS 1.0 all the way up to XP on them.
This is possible using 1K sectors (double the normal 512K sector size) which doubles the maximum recognized partition capacity by using a 64K cluster size. This was used mostly with magneto-optical media years back but I guess it can be used with modern flash media, too. This isn’t the “standard” FAT16 format however and may present compatibility issues if a particular platform doesn’t recognize 64K (or greater) FAT16 cluster sizes.
Awesome, Mindfield. Thanks for explaining that; it clears up a big mystery. At least, I hope it does. I’ve tried to find out if this is the case with my 4GB SD card … and it seems likely that it is indeed what’s going on, because my MP3 player will read the card and all 4GB, but some devices claim it isn’t formatted, like (bizarrely) my USB 2.0 Lexar multi-card reader when plugged into any computer … but I can’t seem to find a utility that will tell me the sector size of a disk. Anybody know of a utility that will do that?
Hmm … when I opened the disk in Tiny Hexer, a freeware disk/hex editor, it lists sector 0 as going from 0x000 through 0x01ff, which is only 512 bytes. But that may just be the editor assuming each sector is 512 bytes.
If you’re running a SATA or SATA2 drive, and you want to boot and format that drive with DOS, you’re out of luck. DOS won’t recognize the SATA interface. You should be okay with any version of IDE, though. (At least, that was my experience with DOS and Win95 recently - I may have missed something).