jfsutils-1.1.13

[Chewi]

I should point out that DOSEMU actually boots much faster than real DOS on the Libby and seems faster in general. I guess it doesn't have to do any real hardware detection and benefits from Linux's better drivers underneath.

[Aitch]

hehe

The 570 was my second IBM, with a 4Gb hdd sporting W3.11, now in the 560, replaced by a 10Gb 5200rpm drive - much quicker [The 570 was saved from a company upgrade to 600s]

Just for fun - still active!

http://4dos.zzl.org/

& this may interest you: 4dos2unix commands

http://www.gci275.com/archive/jambtm02.zip

this gives upper memory info for dos speed

http://www.cubic.org/docs/configuring.htm

more tips

http://www.gci275.com/websites.shtml

Anyhow, enough history updates [I'm a boring ol' f*rt, really ]

Aitch

[DMcCunney]

Had usb working OK, with an external harddrive & an external CD writer [only 2x, but worked OK] played with microdrives for extra ram effect, but once had hyperdisk working, a dos based ram utility which was quite fast

I still have my old XT clone sitting on a shelf. A NEC V20 CPU running at 10mhz, 640KB of main memory, and AST 6Pak card with a MB of EMS memory, of which 512K went to a ramdisk, 256K was disk cache, and 256K was used by various things that could address EMS. A ?Hercules graphics card drove an Amdek amber monitor. Two 20MB Seagate ST-225 hard drives completed the package.

My boot sequence copied COMMAND.COM and some other frequently used utilities to the ramdisk for instant access, and stuff that could be told what to use for temp files, like PKZIP, got pointed there. Sped stuff up a treat.

The secret weapon was the MKS Toolkit, from Mortice Kern Systems. The Toolkit provided DOS versions of most Unix commands that made sense in a single user, single tasking environment, including a remarkably complete version of the Korn shell, which had everything save asynchronous sub-processes (since DOS didn't do that.)

Installed in fullest Unix compatibility mode, the Toolkit replaced COMMAND.COM at boot with init.exe. Init ran, and printed a Login: prompt and optional password. When you entered an ID, it looked it up in a Unix compatible /etc/passwd file, and if it found it, it changed to whatever was that ID's home directory, and ran whatever was specified as the ID's shell.

I had IDs that used the Korn shell, JP Software's 4DOS, vanilla COMMAND.COM, and Desqview. If I exited the shell I was using, control returned to init, I'd get a login prompt, and could use a different ID. I could change environments without having to reboot the machine. When I was running the MKS Korn shell, it could be hard to tell it wasn't really a Unix machine, as all the usual Unix commands were there and everything largely worked the way it would on Unix.

I had a lot of fun seeing how much performance I could squeeze out of the box, and my setup produced a variety of "But you can't do taht in DOS!" comments.

I used a variety of the procedure when I moved to Win 3.1, and had custom logins that would diddle the Win 3.1 config files and run Win 3.1 with alternative desktops instead of the default Program Manager. The one I used most often was an IBM Employee written freeware offering that tried to make Windows look and act like OS/2's Workplace Shell. That didn't have Program Manager's 40 program group limitation, and allowed icons on the desktop, Moving to Win95 was painless for my SO, because she used the IBM environment under Win 3.1, and was already used to the new concepts.

I used to trawl shell extension city for dos apps/tips though I eventually got a fairly solid W98SE+ME bits working quite well, and easy to repair; before discovering puppy, I'd tried allsorts of 'nixes from floppy up

Ahhh. Shell City has been one of my daily visits for years. Site owner Bob Helmer does a magnificent job of collecting interesting free stuff for Windows, and has links for stuff for other OSes as well.

I was delighted to finally migrate off Win98SE to Win2K. Despite everything I knew to keep it stable (and I knew a fair bit), it reached the point where I was rebooting five times a day. I held off as long as I did because certified drivers weren't available for my scanner. I eventually found beta drivers that worked. Win2K just ran, and only got rebooted if I diddled with the hardware or installed software that required it. Otherwise, it was up 24/7.

I still have it around, triple-booting 2K, XP and Ubuntu on the desktop.
______
Dennis

[jakfish]

Aitch--those are great sites. Your web crawling is better than mine

Dennis: quite a zone you've found. The NEC V20 is circa late eighties? It's one thing to do what you did, quite another when you worked with only 1 1/2 mbs of memory. My first laptop was a Bondwell with a meg of memory total--and I thought just running DOSShell was impressive.

Jake

[DMcCunney]

Dennis: quite a zone you've found. The NEC V20 is circa late eighties?

Something like that. It was an 8086 clone with improved microcode, so it ran about 5% - 15% faster at the same clock rate. It also added 80186 instructions, so some software compiled for the 80286 could run on it. It was a chep performance increase. There was also a NEC V30 that was an 80286 clone.

It's one thing to do what you did, quite another when you worked with only 1 1/2 mbs of memory.

You got creative back then, because the hardware was limited.

My Palm OS PDA runs faster (200mhz), has more RAM (128MB), and more storage (two 2GB SD cards) than the old XT clone.

My first laptop was a Bondwell with a meg of memory total--and I thought just running DOSShell was impressive.

I vaguely recall the Bondwell.

Ancient kit still turns up in novel applications. A few years ago, I was at ConJose, the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA. The Registration area was using ancient laptops with no hard drive, booting off a floppy running MS-DOS, and using DBase III storing data on a floppy. Whenever they had a slack period, they had a process that synced everybody's updates to a master database. If it was a peak period and they had to add staffers to handle the volume, they booted up a few more laptops.

No network, no server, no complexity, and dirt cheap to implement. I was boggled when I realized what they'd done. I'm an IT guy used to servers and networks, and it's not an approach I would have thought of.
(The guy who ran ConJose's Registration operation had been a programmer at Ashton Tate back when. He said "I wrote some of the most annoying parts of DBase III." )
______
Dennis

[jakfish]

Sometimes simple is good, the way to go. I recently hacked my Panasonic DVD player to make it region-free. The easiest way turned out to be within a program written for DOS, booted off a DOS floppy, that shot the code to the player via IR. I've never seen DOS play nice with IR, but I'm no longer confined to Region One, so something must've worked.

Jake