Research Stream: DOS 2.x
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Recap of OS/2 1.0 Research Stream
| DOS 2.x/MT-DOS 4 Initial Exploration | |
|---|---|
| VoD Link | RESEARCH STREAM: The First Version of OS/2 ... |
| Streamed On | June 7th, 2025 |
| Streamed by | NCommander |
| Stream type | Emulated on 86Box |
Description
So, in this stream, we establish a baseline by the common ancestor between the single user versions of DOS, and what would go on to become OS/2 1.x.
Things Done
DOS 2.x
- Configured IBM XT CGA card with green monoscreen display
- Had some trouble getting stuff going but eventually got things started
- Formatted and installed DOS 2 with FDISK and copy
- Tried out WordStar for a bit
- Decided to rebuild DOS 2 on DOS 2
- Seemed like a good benchmark to see how things did/didn’t change
- Had a false start due to forgetting exe2bin from disk 2
- Looked at DOS 2.0 source code while at it
- Took about 70 minutes to builds
- Turns out this source distro is not complete, doesn’t build IO.SYS which meansa bootable system isn’t possible
- There was another DOS 2 src distro from OS2Museum, but it needs DOS 4 to build …
- Two versions of DOS
- IBM features/standard features
- Essentially customizations made to DOS to suit IBMs needs
- Most notably, the default prompt, being A> vs A:\>
- 6:13PM started building
Multitasking DOS 4 (1985)
- Multiple versions, none of them appear to be final
- Microsoft released a beta version with MS-DOS 4’s source code
- There was also a later build known as Build 6.7
- Very broken
- Multitasking MS-DOS 4.00 internal work 2.06
- Used a full screen SM command, which could map commands back and forth
- Then use a keybind to switch to a session back and forth
- Very awkward UI, and the disk didn’t have tools like format and such
- SM was a command line utility that was loaded and then used to switch between sessions
- Build 6.7
- Somewhat better, uses double tapping Alt to switch sessions back and forth
- However, had weird behavior, and format crashed