Pretty much useless, since FreeDOS is way better at being MS-DOS than MS-DOS itself, especially compared to such old versions of it, but still: https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS As expected, everything is in x86 assembly. It's mainly of historical value. No real use for it.
What generation of computers used so early DOS versions? I remember using DOS 6.2 on 486 and I think my friend had DOS 5.0 on his 386.
yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah! this is like christmas and new year on one day! Together with NortonCommander it was a very stable and useful OS back then.
i remember i had a turbo boost button on the front of the pc and a digital display saying what the mhz was on my old 486.
Holy hell! J/k, I had a hunch it would be for 8086 machines, close, IBM used 8088 variant. To really put things into perspective, the fab node for 8088/86 was 3 micrometers! To think fab node was measured in micrometers... we've come a long way. Of course the 4.77 MHz speed and up to 640 KB memory are equally impressive I often think what if we could go back in time and tell what PCs are capable of in 30 years time. We'd probably be burnt as witches!
I remember back when I got my first PC wondering if some day we'll have graphics like in the Tron movie. Or we click a button and watch movies through the net. Or we could store CD games fully in a hard drive without having to use CDs anymore. Or have affordable monitors larger than 17". Nah, never gonna happen. This would be Star Trek tech, probably none of us gonna live to see it. Maybe by the year 2100 or so. Well... Now we got all those things, which are freakin' magic, and all we do is complain about them
You, too??!!! (486DX33?) Switching from 33MHz to a MASSIVE 40MHz by a single press of a button?! 33MHz = games ran perfect, a bit slow sometimes ... 40MHz = *BAMM* You're dead! The enemy travelled the whole way across the map in under 1 second and completely drained your 1.000.000 HP right at the start point. Later: 33MHz = Command & Conquer ran slow, the units took a loooong time to move a few pixels. 40MHz = C&C's soldiers finally learned how to run. Upgrade to Pentium 1 w/ 133MHz = Oh? Where did my soldiers vanish? All dead already?
Spoiler Today even our BIOSes are bigger than 1MB most of the time. Even some programmable mice have more than 1MB of storage (for profiles), let alone any "conventional" kind of storage (USB drives, harddisks, etc.). Today 640kb is exactly enough space for you to say: "Hey, I have got 640kb space. Brutal!" Don't you agree?
So true. Game graphics at the moment can basically match or are close to special VFX of 90s. At least close enough for everyday Joe. To also have complex, large game worlds running in real time in insanely high resolutions (1920x1080 and beyond when not too long ago 640x480/800x600 was "high def") is amazing indeed. But yes, shifting expectations and all that, today if not 4K@60 maxed then crap
Didn't have that on the 486 but did on the next PC which was a Pentium 150. The turbo button would switch between 75 and 150 MHz. In reality all it did was change the number on the display, guess the mobo didn't have turbo feature or CPU multiplier was locked Managed to overclock to 166 MHz of course by increasing bus frequency to 33 MHz from 30 MHz. The 486 was upgraded once too with the DX2 overdrive chip, adding an FPU and doubling clock speed! (It was the SX25 model which didn't have an FPU like the DX ones did). So first a DX2 chip to double speed, then an upgrade to Pentium to triple speed from that (+overclock). Then a bit later a Voodoo Graphics 3D card was added to the Pentium system making it what I considered at the time a goddamn supercomputer! Good old days... when upgrades were really upgrades Imagine tripling your CPU speed today with an upgrade. Well, I suppose technically you could if you switched from a dual or quad core to say hyper-threaded hexa- or octacore.
im glad weve moved away from the beige colour scheme, used to go a grim tobacco colour with age too. I had the DX2 upgrade, was a beast back then, noticable difference after upgrades was a plenty. Albeit a time when you certainly didnt want a window on your case!
I'm pretty sure the DX2 chip alone got me hooked into PC building / upgrading, lols! It was just so cool. Yeah, lots of things have improved, case colour schemes being one of them.
Good old days. Back then I proudly considered myself a system programmer because I could make a TSR program (even without assembler - right in C) and knew how to use INT 21h. As for old PCs, I remember at my first work (after the graduation from University) I had a desktop case with 3 compartments for FDDs. In lower one indeed was FDD. And upper one was left open because HDD sometimes refused to spin up, and I helped him by finger (HDD has one end of its shaft outside its case) through that upper compartment. Magic!
