I am fully aware that BIOS used to be updated in MS-DOS. I am 41 years old, older than some people who seem to be experts on this and probably older than Liam. Stefano, did you ever successfully update your bios? Reality is, Windows 95 dos and Windows 98SE DOS is not really dos per se and Windows ME DOS is definitely a weird hybrid that is way different from all previous versions of MS-DOS that Microsoft created. DELL probably recommends using a version of Windows to update the bios that is an NT based Windows. I agree that using Windows NT to update BIOS or even Firmware is foolishness. Windows NT is a very complex OS where all we are talking about when we are updating BIOS or Firmware is something that should not require graphics let alone the NT kernel. Sounds to me like Stefano's DELL is not solidly ancient and not adequately modern. It is close to being completely MS-DOS compatible and not quite modern either where you would want to run bloated Windows NT on it. By abandoning MS-DOS, Microsoft made updating your BIOS and later your firmware ridiculously painful. Microsoft could have open sourced MS-DOS 4.0, they never have. Nowadays, a lot of motherboard manufacturers want you to put the new image on a USB key formatted FAT32 and you go into the Firmware before boot and it does the update without introducing another OS. The reason for this, using Windows NT to update firmware or BIOS which is a software change that affects hardware doesn't make any sense. BIOS and Firmware updates are neither solidly software nor are they solidly hardware. What Stefano is trying to update blurs the line between what is software and what is hardware. Hardware is something you can kick, software is just software. Hardware when we are talking about modern computing obviously needs software to do anything useful. For my first 20 years, MS-DOS was definitely alive. DOS has technically been dead ever since Windows 95 A came out. Jim, you brought DOS back to life. However people, updating BIOS and Firmware in DOS has been impossible for over a decade in the eyes of most hardware manufacturers. The Raspberry Pi which is sadly a proprietary hardware platform, does nut support DOS. I thought it did by some miracle. It doesn't. Apparently, nobody has released a hypervisor for the Raspberry Pi 4 that will emulate an 80386 or earlier well enough to run FreeDOS or any DOS without issues.
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