Google seems unable to answer such a simple question, so i was wondering if anyone here could tell me. How much space does DOS itself use/take up? All Google tells me is recommended partition sizes but nothing of how much the actual OS itself uses. Thanks. Edit: Dos 6.xx
Considering that the whole OS fits on about 4 floppy drives, I'd gander it takes up around 8MB. I don't know if it decompresses any files when installing, so it's likely either the same size as the 4 Floppies (it actually fits on 3 floppies, it uses a 4th for drivers). Otherwise, I'd take a guess any say it takes up less than 20MB. The only way to tell would be to install it to a virtual drive, copy the size of the drive before installing MS-DOS, and then installing it and comparing the size of it afterwards.
I'm guessing you are referring to the old MS-DOS, or are you referring to DR DOS, FreeDOS, PC DOS, PTS DOS... what version? Typically for all of these, just the main files a couple of hundred kilobytes covers it with spare room.
Not if it was DOS 5.1 if I recall... All those help files and the fact that included Basic and Edit was a huge step for the OS... aahh those were the days! I really feel the need to screw someones computer doing a deltree!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MS-DOS_system_files without "Standard DOS utility programs:" you had almost all diskette space for your apps. Guess somebody was creating those DOS diskettes back then for many years. Edit: I don`t know about "included Basic" but QuickBasic and QuickC were super comfortable IDEs.
My original guess was actually over-estimating. I just installed MS-DOS 6.22 in a Virtual Machine and the difference in size before and after is a little under 7MB. So there you have it: MS-DOS 6.22 takes just under 7MB of space.