I rarely had the box and the manual of anything in my early years roaming the world of PCs. For this project I vouched to treat myself, as much as price sanity allowed, with part's boxes and manuals .
The treatment started right with acquiring an OS.
My early 90s years on PC were all on MS-DOS 5 but since I now had an IBM I wanted to stay on theme and got PC-DOS, the IBM rebranded version of MS-DOS. I found a good deal with PC-DOS 7.
The box is HUGE and includes a satisfyingly heavy manual.
PC-DOS 7 had many improvement for someone who had grown up with MS-DOS 5. The list goes on an on[1] with AntiVirus and Stacker 4.0 for Disk Compression.
However, in the context of retro-PC, the two important changes are REXX programming language and the e editor. Since most of my muscle memory was tied to BAT and EDIT.COM I did not spend time learning the new stuff. I downloaded EDIT.COM and placed it in C:\DOS. It worked like a charm.
To learn more about that PC-DOS, there is a cool video by The Retro Collective[2]
One of PC-DOS 6 features I enjoyed the most is the ability to have a boot menu directly via CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. That was much more convenient than using boot floppy, especially later during the project as the configuration multiplied with the network card and a CD drive.
For a refreshed on CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT there are some excellent resources[3].
Back in the days I had no idea about DOSKEY. Nowadays, even though I am cheap with my Conventional Memory, I can't use DOS without it.
| ^ | [1] | IBM PC DOS Version 7 |
| ^ | [2] | What is IBM PC DOS 2000? - History and Unboxing |
| ^ | [3] | Guide to CONFIG.SYS & AUTOEXEC.BAT version 3.04 |
