Virutal PC & MS-DoS

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DOS 6.22 was the last stand-alone DOS. The DOS that came built-in with Windows 95 was called 7.0, and the DOS with Windows 98 was 7.1, if I remember rightly. (They are what runs if you run those operating systems in DOS mode.)Your 6.22 is probably lacking the driver you need for your CD-ROM. CD-ROMs were pretty new when it came out, and not standard, and you were expected to instal your own driver (which came with the CD drive). You can probably find an adequate generic driver on the Net, or you may be able to transfer a copy of the CD driver from the 7.1 machine.

Beleive it or not, I still have one person who is using a DOS based PC at work. Our accounting system runs off of DOS and it still works great for her. We're moving into the 21st century and will be upgrading to a windows based accounting system hopefully by early next year. Finally.

Look it up.

I'll tell ya hun.

DOS stands for Disk Operating System. It's a VERY old operating system that works off of commands and such. No one really uses this much anymore.. very seldom.

I have an old computer running DOS 6.1 in the house. It's not used much now - it just has some old games on it.DOS was a Microsoft copy of basic Unix and the very earliest versions actually accepted Unix commands.

There are still a few that come from UNIX like 'cd' and the pipe command '|'.

DOS was a Microsoft copy of basic UnixHuh? DOS (written by Tim Patterson, and called QDOS when released) came from Seattle Computer Products in the old days. It was a roll-your-own knockoff of CP/M, which was written by Gary Kildall, one of the major microcomputer pioneers in the 70's. (Anyone remember CP/M 2.2?)SCP's DOS was licensed to Microsoft for $100,000 in 1980, to sell to IBM.DOS has little to do with Unix, even if it had/has some Unix-like commands. Its command line interface is actually much more like DEC's proprietary operating systems.

By the way, the DOS that came with Windows 95 was not very capable. The DOS that came with NT/2000/XP was much, much better. MS had to write a "simulation" of DOS for it to run under their "real" OSes, and the simulation turned out to be a lot better than the real thing.NT/2000/XP's DOS can't support a lot of the old games, but for doing real work, it's a great improvement.

real men play on the command line

when you say "DEC's proprietary operating systems" you mean VMS, right?

My memory may be completely wrong on this, but my memory thinks that QDOS was a separate, alternative, operating system to MS-DOS. The term "DOS" was not proprietary, and was used by a number of systems, including the Apple disk reading software, a copy of which had to reside on every disk. (I never quite understood why the software on how to read a disk was on the disk.)DEC had a few different systems for different computers. I used to use its TOPS-20 system - a really excellent command-line interface, at least for the beginner. It would take an input and complete it if possible, both with commands and filenames (so you didn't have to type in more than would make the name unique), and you could get brief help at any point in a line.

I mean TOPS-10's predecessors, for the PDP-11 and its predecessors. Remember the "pip" (peripheral interchange program) command?David Cutler, Windows NT's architect, also architected VMS. He's now retired, I believe, presumably living off his Microsoft stock.Ineligible> ...that QDOS was a separate, alternative, operating system to MS-DOS.Check out this history.

In reply to: real men play on the command line Hyperterminal counts, right?

By the way, VMS was the successor to TOPS-10 and -20.