Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

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> PC DOS 2000 (the final mainstream MS/PC DOS release).

FSVO "mainstream". IBM released PC DOS 7.1 (with full FAT32 and LBA support) as a free download as part of its Server Guide Scripting Toolkit.

It can readily be combined with the rest of PC DOS 2000 to yield a complete OS, comparable to "MS-DOS 7.1" extracted from Win98SE.

I have described how to do this on my blog:

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/59703.html

> Pity DR-DOS seems to have disappeared into the ether.

It is still around, but Udo Kuhnt has, sadly, given up the Enhanced DR OpenDOS project.

The boot floppies on archiveos.org are defective. I have fixed them, and posted disk images of them on my blog, too.

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html

> It was a competent choice to, and I know there was a point where you could get a

> source distribution for embedded purposes, so you'd expect that the next logical step

> would have been crowdfunding a source buyout.

Strongly agreed. :-/

My "Mainstream" was "It came as a shrink-wrapped bundle that had an instruction manual and CD, when I bought it at a computer swap meet ages ago." :) This makes me think it was actually targeted for some market intending to be used as a standalone OS.

Mine didn't have a box, just the bundle wrapped, so I wonder if the use case was similar to how some OEMs ship FreeDOS for the "it has an OS for contractual reasons" purpose. You don't need a box if it's being slipped in the system packaging.

Ah, OK, that makes sense, then.

As a counter-example:

DR-DOS from Caldera or Lineo made it to v7.03, I think.

Versions 7.04 through to 7.07 were finished, released and sold, but only as OEM products, bundled on bootable floppies containing Ontrack and Seagate hard disk toolkits, in Nero Burning ROM's bootable floppies and so on. (I suspect also in virus scanners, disk-imaging products, backup tools, etc.) Just the boot file(s) and COMMAND.COM.

Given that a bootable diskette containing a disk manager was included with probably hundreds of thousands to millions of EIDE hard disks at the end of the 1990s... it's quite possible that more copies were ever shipped that way than were sold as standalone retail products.

(Arguably, but IMHO: sad to say.)

So by any reasonable definition, the "mainstream" version of DR-DOS might be the one bundled on maybe millions of bootable diskettes, and not the boxed product.

I have no idea how many copied of PC DOS 7.1 IBM has distributed this way, and I bet it hasn't either.

But I take your point, and I accept it. I just have a slightly different definition myself. :-)

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