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Date:	Fri, 12 Mar 2004 12:27:58 PST8
From:	"Steven Levine" <steve53@earthlink.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: DOS 5.0

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In <405200B4.4CC8B2D6@pacbell.net>, on 03/12/04
at 10:25 AM, "J. R. Fox" said:

>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

I suspect you just learned more on how to get TSRs to load high. I see
about the same numbers in v5 and v6. For me that's somewhere north of
600K for standard setups. For specialized setups, I can get over 700K if
I limit myself CGA video.

>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.

Depends on the app. The vast majority of DOS apps require nowhere near
600K of RAM. Those that do make use of DOS protected mode emulators which
provide many of the advantages of OS/2 protect mode. A typical example is
Jan's dfsdos.

>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.

It's definitely easier with DOS6, but it was possible with DOS5.

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

This is apples and oranges. It's like comparing cmd.exe and 4os2.exe.
Different products from different vendors.

Regards,

Steven

--
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"Steven Levine" MR2/ICE 2.41 #10183 Warp4/FP15/14.093c_W4
www.scoug.com irc.webbnet.info irc.fyrelizard.org #scoug (Wed 7pm PST)
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