I plead "not guilty" to any of the sophisticated motives Thomas outlined
but, as so often with the Digest, he made me think again.
I was using the Digest only as a convenient forwarding mechanism to get
a reply to Dev, so you missed the preamble. I am using a PS/2 Model 70
386 (25mHz, I think) with a 120mB HD DBLSPACEd, 16mB RAM, and a Type
8514 display with a Type 8514a driver card. OS is DOS 6.2.
They say DOS 6.2 is better than DOS 6.22 because it had pirated more
effective sub-routines such as DBLSPACE. They had to re-issue it using
their own MS but inferior sub-routines on pain of litigation. Anecdotal
but plausible -- in any case, it ain't broke so I don't need to fix it!
I thought I had to use SETVER because much of my software is space-
economical old-school, like WP 5.2 (Same as WP 5.1 but for Win 3.1 --
weird that no one ever admits to WP 5.2's existence). I avoid upgrading
because I simply do not have HD space for all those bloated suites that
demand equally bloated OSs. Even so, I was obliged to resort to DBLSPACE
5 yrs ago, regardless of all those scarey reports about it, but I still
have 30% free and a faultless cold-RESTORE routine and record. I admit
to a lot of ZIPing and off-HD storing, but I have often wondered what
people really need all those plural gBs for, and how long they spend
backing up -- if they ever do.
SETVER assured me that any old software specifying an earlier version of
DOS could be made to work under DOS 6.2. I now discover that in that
event I would get a warning message demanding a command for the
complaining program. I have never received one so I guess I don't really
need SETVER.
Now I find it is the same for ANSI.SYS. I had needed it many years ago
to customize a non-standard keyboard, send escape sequences to an old
daisy-whell printer, configure an ancient 2400 Baud modem, and to set
alternative screen modes. Now I do not need these things, and can
imagine no others that I might. So thanks to Thomas and the Digest for
the thought-provoking jolt.
Yours, Aye,
Stephen.
-- Arachne V1.61, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
