> I hope that Chuck will correct some of the errors that I made below:
On Thu, 2 Jun 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote:
I think you've pretty much got it.
Was it 4.00 that added 2.8M?
Sounds right--but it may also be a matter of *which* 4.0. MS or IBM?
Some GOOGLEing seems to show it as being 5.00
and, I left out 3.00 being first official support of 1.2M
I wonder whether the folks coding 1.2M support knew that it
wasn't for an 8" ?
At some point, MSDOS decided that the hard disk would always be C:, with
any additional removable drives trailing that. That probably helped a
lot. And there was always a drive B:, whether or not a physical drive
was present (if not, it mapped to drive A: with suitable prompting
messages).
That seemed to be their intent starting with 5.00
However, when I put 5.00 on a 5160 with four floppies and motherboard
switches properly set for that, the MS-DOS 5.00 INSTALL choked on wanting
C:, but it worked fine when put on without using INSTALL.EXE (FORMAT/S on
another machine with it installed, boot from that DOS5.00 boot floppy,
SYS the hard drive, copy the files.)
That still worked when I replaced that 5160 motherboard with a 386 and
generic AT four drive floppy controller! The OS didn't seem to care about
processor.
(But, I was surprised that the Cordata laser printer software refused to
try to run on mewer than 8088 processor. But, I had 4 different interface
boards (such as Eiconscript) connected to an ABCD switch on that CX
engine)
Thank you for the Ctrl-A tip on DRIVPARM. Strangely, PC-DOS DRIVPARM
worked for me with generic BIOS, but not real IBM BIOS on the same
machine. The FAIL with IBM BIOS was "Unrecognized command in
CONFIG.SYS"!
I don't know which versions and/or which OEM'd versions had 8" support.
Probably ended with 6.00
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred [email protected]
