On Thu, 29 Apr 2021 at 18:17, Johnpaul Humphrey <jpth1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I do not know about SYSINFO. I do not use it too much. having a way to > check battery would be good on laptop.
I guess this is part of the problem. We forget how things are on a multitasking OS. There used to be a very obscure OS called Digital Research DOS Plus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Plus It was an ancestor of DR-DOS, but before DR had the idea of doing a rival to MS-DOS. DOS Plus was descended from Concurrent CP/M, but was a single-user system with some, very limited, MS-DOS compatibility. In the UK it was shipped with the first Amstrad PCs (Europe's first cheap PC clones) and Acorn's BBC Master 512, an educational Mostek 6502 computer with an Intel 80186 co-processor. The most visible difference between DOS Plus and any other DOS was that DOS Plus displayed a status line at the bottom of the screen, showing the time, what if anything was printing in the background, which of its 4 screens you were on and some other info. It could multitask CP/M-86 programs, but not DOS ones. But without multitasking, how could you display a battery monitor? On DOS, nothing can "run in the background" because there is no background to run in. In principle it could be in the prompt, but apart from the time, there is no mechanism to _dynamically_ update an environment variable to hold a changing value. One could write a TSR to do it (I think!) but that is more precious base memory used up. The one thing I can think of is that in DOSemu in Linux, when you start a session, it lists the available drives and what they are mapped to. I always put a few commands in at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT to display the disk cache size (SMARTDRV /V on PC DOS), the amount of free base memory (MEM /C), and the DOS version (VER /R). A list of available drives would be a really nice addition. For a more friendly FDISK, it might be possible to adapt the Linux `cfdisk` tool, a menu-driven disk-partitioner, but it seems to have more risk than benefit. Since DOS cannot by default access or display drives formatted with NTFS, HPFS, ext2/3/4, XFS, Btrfs, ZFS etc., then a friendly partitioner that makes it easy to remove drives whose contents you can't see is asking for trouble. Better to boot a Linux CD and use GParted. I have long been pondering a very simple, very heavily cut-down, text-only Linux whose main purpose was to multitask multiple instances of DOSemu -- making it work like DESQview or something in the late 1980s/early 1990s. An OS in the tens of megabytes, worst case a few hundred megs, which let you multitask DOS apps at full native speed. (I.e. unlike DOSbox or some other emulator). It might be both fun and useful, but it's not really DOS any more... -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
