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Date:	Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:25:49 PST8
From:	"J. R. Fox" <jr_fox@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: DOS 5.0

Content Type: text/plain

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on 03/11/04

> at 10:03 AM, "J. R. Fox" said:
>
> >If I may ask, Sandy, why DOS 5 ? Wouldn't you get more functionality
> >from your DOS using ver. 6.22 or 7.x ?

Steven Levine wrote:

> And what sort of "more functionality" would you expect to be there?
>
> I suspect you, like most folks, could not tell me more than one or two
> differences between the versions without a lot of Google time.

And I suspect you won't get much better than a draw on this bar bet, Steven.
Based entirely on (failing) memory -- no Google cheating -- I come up with
the following:

1) Memory utilization: In the DOS 5 days, I did not see much better than
about 515K left free for programs. That was barely sufficient for some
app.s, not quite enough for others. By DOS 6x, I would get around 545K
free, after loading whatever drivers I had to load (incl. some into High Mem.),
based on a lot of experimentation that showed me what setup yielded the
best result. By IBM DOS 2000 (a.k.a. PC DOS 7.0), I got 575K of RAM left
to execute programs. I can't quote you what I get now from DR-DOS 7.03
without stopping what I'm doing and booting that partition, but I believe it is
something north of 620K.

This is still a big deal, for anyone who ever runs real DOS app.s under real
DOS. Nowadays, we tend to take our unimpeded flat memory model under
OS/2 or 32-bit Win for granted, but there was a time when usable memory
really mattered.

You might say this is too subjective, but it is one subject doing very similar
things, over the course of the DOS era.

2) Branched Execution, and not just of ordinary batch files ( :label ). The
ability to have one AUTOEXEC.BAT and one CONFIG.SYS that could
branch and act like several different AXC or CFG files, depending on user
input, was potentially Huge ! I believe this came in with DOS 6.x, and I
recall making extensive use of it.

3) Some app.s compatibility . . . though I believe you could generally fudge
on this by use of SETVER.

4) IIRC, the DOS util.s FC (like COMP, but more detailed) and DISKCOMP
got dropped by _some_ later releases of DOS. Did you miss them ? I did.

5) Better HELP info lookup provided with the later releases.

6) DR-DOS 7.03 has all kinds of bells & whistles straight-up DOS never
dreamed of.

Shall we call this Game, Set, & Match ?

Jordan

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