What is IBM PC DOS 2000? - History and Unboxing

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● Description
Let's break the seal on this brand new copy of IBM PC DOS 2000, get it installed and learn all about the history of the software along the way! Was it just MS-DOS with a different name? Did IBM go the extra mile? And what on Earth was Microsoft Xenix? Time to find out!
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[@AnotherBoringTopic]

Poor Gary Kildall never really gets the recognition that he really should be entitled to after the enormous influence he had on the early personal computer market. He very easily could have found himself supplying IBM's OS instead of Gates and then Microsoft might not even exist today. I always enjoy watching him interact with the various guests on the Computer Chronicles, he really comes across as a friendly, knowledgeable expert, without Gates' harsh mercurial edge.

[@incumbentvinyl9291]

Yawn...

[@squirlmy]

Worse than unappreciated, before his early death he saw the decline of his company, which he had originally called "Intergalactic Digital Research". He wasn't much interested in he business side, initially leaving much of that to his wife. Also, he was part of California culture when much of the computer business and culture; namely IBM, DEC and boffins at MIT, were still centered in the corporate northeast. It would take a few more years for Silicon Valley to eclipse them all. Unfortunately his misfortune became a learning lesson for the future California dreamers. Then, his reputation wasn't based on his many achievements, in fact a myth circulated that he was pursuing his hobby of solo flying, keeping reps from IBM waiting, and that's what scuttled the deal with them. This was untrue, but it was at least based on his disdain for the business side of software. That end was more cruel, than how he may presently be less appreciated. When the "gone flying" myth recedes from folklore, I think he wrll be remembered properly.

[@dijoxx]

He had multiple opportunities to break through and unfortunately he blew them all.

[@RMCRetro]

Correction: There is a caption error under Paul Allen, this should read (1953-2018). Hello Cave Dwellers! As many of you find yourself in isolation or working from home I thought we'd try a Premiere to watch a release together! Let's see how it goes, Neil - RMC

[@MrJ0mmy]

4am nz time

[@RMCRetro]

@@MrJ0mmy If you can't catch the premiere it remains listed on the channel just as per a normal release. I'll keep this in mind though, if it goes well I can mix up future release times so that I can get to chat to more of you

[@BuiltBySMASNUG]

Honestly this is a great idea, really appreciate the thought. Love the content too, which definitely helps!

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I wonder why KZbin doesn’t allow you to make updates to an upload. Other sites, like Vimeo, do.

[@RMCRetro]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 It would be a REALLY useful feature to have

[@jamesl.5849]

Thank you for sharing this, I didn't even know there was a PC-DOS 7 / 2000. I was the QA Lead on the Microsoft MS-DOS line from MS-DOS 3.3 to MS-DOS 5.0 My team of only two testers avoided the PC-DOS 4.0 major bugs and won control back control of the design because of it. MS-DOS 5.0 was developed using a small fraction of the size team than the PC-DOS 4.0 team. The team moved on and created Windows 95 later.

[@TiagoJoaoSilva]

James L. Yep, 4.01 was a good polishing of a... still a bit hairy, but given the source... I remember getting all giddy when my new computer came with a boxed MS-DOS 5 - that manual ended well thumbed-up!

[@Lofote]

Was that the Multitasking DOS 4.0?

[@magmajctaz1405]

Thanks for the history lesson. I got into computers in the early 90s, and this brought back so many memories. I grew tired of MS, so I bought PC-DOS. (I believe 7.0.) A feature I loved, was the memory management. Prior to PC-DOS 7.0, one could squeeze a bit more free memory out of their computer if they ordered their device drivers in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT in a specific loading sequence. This took a bit of trial and error. PC-DOS had a feature that would re-sequence device drivers, automatically reboot, check the available memory, re-sequence, and reboot again, eventually finding the perfect device driver loading sequence. Fascinating!

[@drnubus4613]

Are you referring to RAMBoost when you said it'd restart several times? I believe that was IBM's response to MemMaker and Quarterdeck's Optimize.

[@hernancoronel]

I was working at IBM from ‘94 to ‘99 in the Personal Software Products Unit here in Buenos Aires when DOS 2000 was released. I also used DOS 2.11 when I bought my first PC! Thank you for the great video!

[@chriswareham]

My IBM 5150 is currently running XENIX! A previous owner had upgraded the machine with a beefier power supply and 10MB Seagate hard drive, so it was quite straightforward to install XENIX using floppy disk images and a HxC 2001 floppy drive emulator.

[@TheAnkMan]

Too bad XENIX (and isn't it pronounced XEENIX (ee like in "see")?) is still proprietary though discontinued, while CP/M was open sourced in 2001 I guess. Would love to run it in a IBM 5150 in an emulator. I already did this with CP/M-86.

[@chriswareham]

@@TheAnkMan XENIX isn't open source, but the original Unix source code that it's based on is. Bell Labs distributed it in source form, and during the time the rights to the code were owned by Caldera they put it under a much more permissive license.

[@TheAnkMan]

@@chriswareham Yes, some UNIXs are open source. I also use FreeBSD and OpenBSD. But I am interested in running obscure operating systems. Besides MP/M as mentioned, I ran OS-9 (not the Apple OS) in an emulation of the TRS CoCo kzbin.info/www/bejne/rJ3Qk3aDoM2papI from 1979 to show its multitasking capabilities. And CP/M on other computers, like the Osborne I or Kaypro, doing some word processing and trying out, how the first Speadsheet programs felt like. Not even Ebay seems to have a package with diskettes for Xenix available.

[@MickeyMousePark]

@@TheAnkMan i was a manager at a Tandy Computer Service Center in the early 1980's ..When OS-9 came out the company saw it has a slight improvement on their cartridge based game machine TRS Color Computer..then we started seeing customers setting it up run with multiple dumb terminals and the company went crazy ..there was a fear that some how the TRS Coco would take some business away from the Model II (soon to be the Model 16) running TRS-Xenix ..or even worse might replace the Model III in in school environments (up to 16 Model III's could be tied together)...The company would not allow us to even speak of the ability that OS-9 could be multi-user..If a customer wanted multi-user they were steered toward the Model II/16 (for schools the Model III costing $900 per unit) at thousands of dollars and away from the TRS Coco that sold fully configured with drive for around $500 .. Also at the time Tandy was also in a death match with Apple for the school market..if they would have shown off the OS-9 capabilities they could have captured the whole school market.. Later Tandy came out with the Tandy 2000..great machine with a 80186 CPU 768K of memory unfortunately the IBM PC came out shortly after and Tandy 1200 (fully PC compatible ) shortly after that ...Tandy did not see what was coming and kept pushing their non-pc compatible's and TRS-DOS which pretty much killed the computer division by the late 1980's..

[@TheJeremyHolloway]

@@TheAnkMan Alas, MicroWare OS-9. If only MicroWare and Digital Research Inc would've merged. We could've had OS-9 with GEM welded together on the Atari ST and other hardware platforms.

[@Colin_Ames]

Thanks for another excellent video. I used to enjoy working with DOS. I got my first PC in 1988 and it ran DOS. At the same time my employer introduced a range of electronic gauging systems, with custom software that ran in a DOS environment, so I became quite familiar with it. It went through many iterations over a number of years, and we had a few customers who refused to upgrade to new Windows-based systems until their old hardware died completely, so I was still working on these as recently as 2016, when I retired.

[@m4rgin4l]

It would be pretty cool if you covered FreeDOS. I've used it extensively when I had to provide support for legacy systems.

[@NeverlandSystemZor]

Having NO experience with that, I'd love to see that, too... would be a great learning opportunity. :)

[@squirlmy]

It's really just like MS-DOS, but it's updated with a few bells and whistles. There's not much different from a user perspective, much like IBM vs MS-DOS. If you know some DOS, just start using it!

[@darranstyler]

I used to run a bullet-in board running on DR-DOS, it's benefit was that it was "multitasking" like Unix where you could run multiple shells. Each shell had a modem and an instance of the bullet-in board software running on it so multiple users could dial in at the same time (I think it was only ever 3-4 users at once).

[@BryonLape]

DR-DOS was far better than MS-DOS, but by then it was too little, too late.

[@zoomosis]

My first PC was an IBM 5170 running PC DOS 3.30. A few years later I was working at a PC repair shop when MS-DOS 5.0 was released, and the biggest issue at the time was the surprisingly large amount of software that refused to run because of the newer DOS version. A handful of software would refuse to run, then crash and lock the PC solid because the "incorrect DOS version" function was never actually tested properly. I believe one of these programs was Microsoft Windows 1.0. Microsoft included SETVER to work around that - you can see the long (and very incomplete) list of COM/EXE files it has by running the SETVER command after you've installed it in CONFIG.SYS. Also from memory SETVER.EXE was a self-modifying EXE, which even back then was a bit shifty and could trigger some antivirus programs. Fast forward a few more years to 1994 and I was running IBM's OS/2 2.0, a huge improvement over DOS, though with a lot of strange quirks of its own. I've often wondered how the PC world would've looked had Xenix took off instead. In the late '80s and early '90s the only place you'd see Xenix (or UNIX) mentioned was the odd computer magazine.

[@Choralone422]

Ahh the SETVER issue! I had a friend who's family owned a 386 SX 16mhz machine back in those days. His PC originally came with MS-DOS 3.3 (even though 4.0 had been released well over a year earlier!) and when he tried to move to MS-DOS 5.0 he got stung by that issue. I think it was a piece of software his dad used that refused to run or had major issues. Anyway back to 3.3 they went until MS-DOS 6.0 was released.

[@RobertdeRooy]

I'm surprised you did not mention that PC-DOS 2000 was also available on CD, the only DOS to be released on CD-ROM.

[@woldemunster9244]

Did it have an separate boot-floppy with "all" different weird controller-card drivers? I can imagine installing the whole thing from floppy and editing autoexec to read CD-ROM just for some additional "multimedia" support... :DDDD

[@Kawa-oneechan]

I tried PC-DOS 7/2000 on a VM today, inspired by this video, and figured hey why not try the CD version? Because it's not bootable, that's why. And it certainly didn't come with a bootable diskette.

[@TheAnkMan]

This reminds me on 1995 when I got the first PC (before I had a C64 and then Amiga). I read a lot about MS and already hated them for their business practices. Later that year I shot a copy of OS/2 and installed that on my whopping 1300 MB (that's 1.3 GB :-) ). Wasn't happy because not all MS DOS programs, especially games, didn't work on it. So I decided to get back to Windows 95. Now I didn't knew what a backup us so had no floppy to boot from. And the BIOS couldn't boot (Windows) CDs. Would had needed to buy MS DOS. But went to a computer store and asked the guy to sell me a bootable floppy. He put and empty floppy in his computer and then format c: /s I think. Took two minutes and he charged me what would be around 3 pounds. I never went to that store again.

[@ethnikLSD]

@@TheAnkMan format a: /s

[@SSubZero]

I *bought* PC-DOS 7 back in the day (at Babbages!) and it came with a boot floppy and a CD. Even back then I thought it was totally silly.

[@AmigosRetroGaming]

Well done, Neil. I'd love to see you jump down the DR DOS rabbit hole, as it was a favorite of mine and my friends for a spell back in the day.

[@ricardobornman1698]

Yup. Stacker was a real sore point and really showed M$'s colors. But you don't get to the top by being nice unfortunately. Brings back some cool memories. Please continue the series.

[@SirSmilie]

the editing and content in these videos is always fantastic. keep doing what you do mate!

[@RMCRetro]

Thank you I will do my best

[@szabolcsmate5254]

10:13 - "I can sense their excitement." - If I spent the first 22 years of my life in a sealed box, I would have been excited to get out!

[@joeldowell5059]

Well now you can, thanks to quarantine!

[@gamefront]

Congrats on 100,000 subs! :)

[@RMCRetro]

Thank you!

[@ExplosiveAction]

A fascinating look at OS history. I'd be interested in diving more into Xenix, which I had no idea existed until this video! Also, congratulations on hitting 100k subscribers!

[@CLS2086]

There are some tests to do to choose your DOS version. At that ime, my favorite test was using 3DSMAX rendering a the demo car picture included. Depending the combination of OS and RAm extender (QEMM/Himem/Emm386...) the rendering time could change from 3min45s to 5min45s with the same machine (my ex 486DX2/66). The best set was MSDOS 6.0A with Himem+Emm386 from MSDos 6.2.0 edition, with the SmartDRV from Win95 SP2 !

[@osgrov]

Great video, cheers! I'd really like to see a history of Xenix. That's a fascinating story I'm sure, and as far as I know it's never been done anywhere else. Also, as I see others have mentioned already: DR-DOS! That'd be an interesting tale, and one I know almost nothing about. :) Keep being awesome, Neil.

[@oslsc]

Here is a video kzbin.info/www/bejne/j4bbkn-Ga8d8ZpI

[@stephenappiah4616]

Great video, please do one for IBM OS/2 as well.. If you can't cover them all maybe for Warp 3 or Warp 4 :)

[@jasonblalock4429]

Yeah, I'd definitely love an OS/2 vid.

[@ArjanvanVught]

@QuestionMan Warp should have been The OS ! :-) Then Windows just as the gaming platform.....

[@magmajctaz1405]

I remember buying Warp 3, then Warp 4. Much more superior product to Win95. I bought version 4 from long defunct Indelible Blue. I used my student ID to get a student discount.

[@ValeryLevchenkoTurin]

Great episode, thank you Neil! And congratulations on reaching 100k :)

[@logansorenssen]

There is an extra config.sys option, DOSDATA=UMB, that can be used to free up a wee bit more conventional memory. This is a chunk of why I like PC DOS 2000 over MS-DOS 6.22.

[@c128stuff]

That editor is a member of a family of editors which dates back to the mid 1980s, through this is a modernized version. I first encountered it as the 'internal use only' e3 editor when I joined IBM in the 2nd half of the 1980s. The epm editor for OS/2 is another member of that family. Within IBM, this family of editors, especially the e3 editor, were extremely popular, and if you have the development tools for it (which from what I recall were not available officially outside IBM), it is a fully programmable editor, in a way similar to emacs, tho it shares no lineage with it in any way. Just the editor as distributed with pc-dos was not ground breaking, especially not in 1993 when it first got introduced, tho you'll find it deals very well with absurdly large files, stupidly long lines, etc, and does that better than even some modern editors. It is too bad the development tools for it weren't made more accessible, and released to the public, because the underlying engine is very powerfull, to todays standards, and certainly to the late 1990s standards. REXX has seen, and probably still sees widespread use on IBM mainframes.. in many ways it is the 'perl of the 1980s/90s' in that people especially used it to glue things together, transform data, etc.

[@savagemadman2054]

It's been many years, but I recall having compatibility issues with PC-DOS 7's memory managers in some games that worked fine on IBM-DOS 6.1 or Windows 95's DOS. On the plus side, I remember that the LH command worked with TSRs that other versions of DOS refused to touch allowing for more free conventional memory than usual.

[@millomweb]

1:30 "IBM's new Prototype Computer" - so now, finally, it has been revealed what 'PC' really stood for !

[@chriscrossan8034]

Love the typeface used for the old MS logo.

[@TheXev]

You should cover DR-DOS next! I ended up using DR-DOS at work once to troubleshoot a massive sort machine... didn't feel like an unfamiliar version of DOS at all really.

[@brianoconnell6459]

That disclaimer for death or dismemberment makes me wonder, did they actually expect your computer to become Skynet?

[@geoffpool7476]

I bought PC DOS 2000 and have used it ever since. Despite its little quirks, I've been very happy with it. Great Video!

[@TrueThanny]

16:05 That's not FAT32. That's HPFS, the improved file system that came with OS/2. It was largely written by Microsoft, who derived NTFS from it later on.

[@_Thrackerzod]

I loved PC-DOS 7. Try running Memmaker, I always found it would free up much more RAM than I could get in MS-DOS 6.22 (without third party memory managers). Someone already mentioned Dynaload which was very nice also, and the Driveparm command also came in very handy allowing me to use a 1.44MB floppy drive on an old 286 that did not support them.

[@plasmaxer]

I had a Word Perfect big box to open many years ago. There were a couple of really big books in there and several floppy discs. I completed all the instructions in the tutorial. It was fun!

[@AnimalFacts]

Breathing in air from 1998.

[@jonathont5570]

Gary was a great guy, smart and brilliant, CPM, laser disc storage and many other things back in the day.

[@anthimatter]

Totally forgot about this one, and Xenix. Thanks for reminding me and the cool history.

[@ottawanker]

Back when PC-DOS 7.0 first came out, DYNALOAD was my killer app. It let you load a device driver after bootup.

[@evilspoons]

But editing config.sys and autoexec.bat and rebooting constantly until you had enough free memory was so much fun!

[@Jossandoval]

@@evilspoons In the Dwarf Fortress sense…

[@VectraQS]

*cries in MS-DOS 6.2*

[@mrkitty777]

Torture with ms dos was hell 😥😮🥺

[@nickwallette6201]

Equivalents existed for MS-DOS too. I had one back in the day, but it was really only useful once, between when you found a new driver and your next reboot. ;-)

[@Chief89Music]

OMG I am actually already in the credits that was fast and is sort of surreal haha and truly my pleasure to at least also contribute 2 or 3 coffees a month for such great content so again thanks for all of the very enjoyable videos . . .

[@davidkgame]

Xenix was bought wholesale by Santa Cruz Operation AKA SCO (who helped develop it) and rebranded to SCO Xenix in the late 80's. When I first started in IT after leaving school one of the clients of the software house I worked at used SCO Xenix as the base OS to run their Pro-IV written stock management system on. SCO also bought another brand of Unix from Berkley and sold both flavours of Unix alongside another one making three in total. SCO Unix was later rebranded SCO Openserver. They got sold to Caldera around the turn of the millenium.

[@brostenen]

Strange.... I remember an IBM 80386 network server. Running Microsoft Xenix.

[@xgf122]

I have SCO Unix original Reference User's Manual book and SCO Unix TCP/IP admin book in english, from my mother's previous work. We had it in Czecho-Slovakia after 1989. :D Also I have user/admin manual to the SCO DOS Services, Network and OS book :D

[@popezmark]

And 100.000 there are! Congratulations!

[@waynetemplar2183]

My first 'proper' job after graduating involved using and programming on IBM mainframes. As part of that I was introduced to REXX, which I loved to use. The company then introduced PCs in the form of IBM PS2s and for some reason they opted not to install REXX! Later, the company moved away from PS2s and used good old PC clones with MS-DOS installed and we finally had more control over what application software we could have installed, which is where I discovered that a company called Mansfield did a version of REXX. I was made up that I could go back to using REXX. I always thought it a shame the language didn't catch on more as it was highly capable for writing command line driven applications.

[@Oosystem]

"They were kind enough not to include any virus in the installation". That was funny.

[@mrkitty777]

Windows 10 unfortunately is everything a computer virus does. 😥

[@baronvonlimbourgh1716]

@@mrkitty777 start using mint, especially if you have no exotic software requirements. It really isn't that much different then windows. Not more so then osx anyway, and people have no issue switching to that. It is a little getting used to if you need to be under the hood. But ooohhh sooooo worth the week or 2 of adjusting in the long run. And don't kid ourselves, windows is never going to get any better. This is the normallity standard now, big data is big money.

[@millomweb]

@@mrkitty777 I 'always' felt MS (to be clear) Windows was the world's first computer virus. Nearly everyone got it !

[@Edman_79]

Congratulations on those 100k subs! I told you you're good! Proud to be part of that history :D

[@cowboyfrankspersonalvideos8869]

I kind of miss MS-Dos. In 1993 I began volunteering as a computer specialist for a small National Park in Virginia. During my interview, I told them "I don't do Windows". They said that was fine as all their computers were DOS based. After about a year when they got their next new computer it came with Windows 3.1. Well I was stuck, so I had to learn Windows. Messy but it worked. Then Windows 95 came out and I was all giddy about the improvement over 3.1. In fact I was the second in line at my local computer store the Day 95 was first available for purchase. Over the years I've become a self taught Windows expert but I still have a number of DOS based batch files I wrote which still run on my servers.

[@fredsmith1970]

8:36 - folding back the cover of a "brand new" manual - makes me weep. :-(

[@daishi5571]

Makes sense if you think about it! DOS was all about masochism :-)

[@Ndlanding]

Me too. I used to buy something new, then go down the pub and read the manual. You can't easily take a CD to the pub. If there is a CD, that is.

[@Tyresome]

With yah! xD

[@NeverlandSystemZor]

I had the SAME thought! That's VINTANGE... AND brand new!

[@Dev_olution]

Very much appreciated, great idea, think we can all use some cheering up these days

[@RichardTroupe]

There is something oddly satisfying about taking off plastic wrapping or breaking a seal.

[@MarkTheMorose]

And yet, part of me is sad. (Those who know me would say I'm completely sad, but that's a different matter.)

[@Tim_3100]

Great episode really helps with the fears right now Its so important for nice things to watch

[@shorerocks]

Wonderful video and presentation. Thx for that. Quite nice trip down memory lane for me.

[@SelfIndulgentGamer]

I find myself always checking out the amazing stuff on the shelves in the background :)

[@danieldaniels7571]

Self Indulgent Gamer me too. Saw a Close Encounters LaserDisk back there

[@DosGamerMan]

Congrats on hitting that 100 000 mark!

[@enjibkk6850]

OMG that floppy disk sound... nostalgia :)

[@mrkitty777]

Emulated sounds probably.

[@brentboswell1294]

Should probably mention the difference between MS-DOS and PC-DOS: PC-DOS was designed to direct any calls to BASIC to the resident BASIC interpreter in the ROM of a genuine IBM computer. MS-DOS included a BASIC interpreter that had to be loaded into RAM: GW-BASIC (GW stood for "Gee Whiz", as it bridged the gap between an IBM PC and a PC-compatible clone). PC clone makers couldn't legally copy IBM's BASIC interpreter, so they left it out of their BIOS/ROM package.

[@WR3ND]

Gotta love those classy *THICC* manuals and looking up all the goodies you could mess around with.

[@jonadabtheunsightly]

My first computer had PC-DOS 3.3. That was a really good solid stable version. I used it for severral years, and I never found any bugs in it, which isn't something I can say for any operating system I've used since.

[@Republic3D]

We used to mess with our teachers in the late 80s by editing autoexec.bat to restart the machine every time it booted.

[@danieldaniels7571]

R3D I edited it to display ASCII porn

[@domrynk2]

"On first boot from the hard disk the IBM anti-virus kicks in, and they were kind enough not to include any viruses in the installation" Fantastic

[@garyslatter9854]

I remember the sound of 3.5" floppies....

[@teekay_1]

REXX was first implemented on IBM Mainframes, and was a significant improvement over their previous mainframe scripting languages EXEC and EXEC2

[@TrueThanny]

01:52 No, it was Seattle Computer Products. Tim Paterson was an employee. He did do pretty much all the design work on the 8086 CPU board, but not as an individual. He also wrote 86-QDOS so there'd be an OS for the product. This was licensed to Microsoft. Several years later, MS settled a lawsuit with SCP for full ownership of DOS. Somewhere in between, Tim Paterson did leave SCP and start working for Microsoft.

[@strayling1]

Stories of the OS wars are endlessly fascinating, and you absolutely nailed this part. A request, if I may: How about a video tracing VMS->NT->Windows 10 alongside Unix->Xenix (etc.)->Linux? Under the hood, the VMS vs. Unix battle is still being fought.

[@NathanChisholm041]

100k! Well done mate!

[@RMCRetro]

Cheers!

[@danmiller515]

Thanks for the great video. Can't wait to see more from the ms, pc, DEC and DR history!

[@T0phen95]

Congratulations on the 100K Subs!

[@RMCRetro]

Thank you

[@GearSeekers]

100K SUBS! No one else deserves this more!

[@RMCRetro]

Thanks so much!

[@matthouben4242]

Something else that would be nice to cover is the multitasking multiuser Concurrent DOS from DRI. IIRC DR-DOS was a single user/single tasking version of Concurrent DOS.

[@AndreGarzia]

Fantastic video as usual. Thanks a ton for the hard work producing such amazing content. The Digital Research rebranding of cp/m-86 is DR-DOS? I remember it vaguely. Can't wait for something like an OS/2 video. Quick question, where do you find boxed old software like that? I wonder if I can grab some older programming languages that were too expensive for me back then for a spin.

[@hcddbz]

CP/M-86 was CP/M for Z80 ported to Intel 86 Arch. DR-Dos was DR version of MS-DOS/PC-DOS. DR lost the feature war by PC-DOS 2.0.(As Microsoft borrowed freely from Xenix tings like directories became normal in MS-DOS while CP/M-86 was flat. In addition PC-DOS and CP/M- 86 application were incompatible. While some CP/M were ported to CP/M-86 they were not optimized for it. CP/M-86 was targeted at business users. However, really go business software optimized for PC came out such as Lotus 123. DOS had more software than CP/M-86 and so DRI threw in the towel and created a DOS clone to run on the PC. DR-DOS 5.0 was better DOS than MS-DOS and second war was fought for hearts and minds of PC-Users. Using FUD fear Uncertainty and Doubt. We detect your not using MS-DOS windows might not run.

[@F4LDT-Alain]

Excellent video, the clear diction and easily understood British English is a real plus! Good that you mentioned Xenix, however more relevant attempts at giving the IBM PC a real multi-tasking O/S were made. MS DOS 4.0 was first developed inside MS as a multi-tasking, virtual console-switching version of DOS (Windows has inherited the "START" command from that era!). MS was trying to offer an alternative to IBM's own non-dedicated DOS-based MS-NET file server (a dirty hack). Every other product, MS' own and Netware required a dedicated server machine then. It was abandoned because the much bigger O/S only left 300-400K of RAM for user programs. and because of numerous compatibility issues with ill-behaved programs. Another, similar attempt was Concurrent CP/M 86, that was actually released but never took off, probably for the same reasons + licence costs as mentioned in your video.

[@trzy]

Am I the only one who nearly had a heart attack when he folded over the front pages of the manual like that?

[@wisteela]

Excellent video. I miss big manuals. Yes, I'd love to see a video on Xenix.

[@Jaspa42]

15 downvotes? Why? Am steeped in nostalgia and loved this.

[@trr94001]

DOS 2000 was, I think, the first software I ever bought as a digital download.

[@bgcreations6995]

Lots of Memories. Who can forget "Microsoft Memmaker"

[@mikecawood]

On my first PC (286) in the mid 1980s the PC came with MS-DOS 3.3. I replaced the OS with DR-DOS 6.0 and found the the memory management was much better, with more base memory freed up.

[@DavidPaulMorgan]

I think I was actually 'certified' on MS-Dos 7 and Win 95 . Happy Days.

Those 5.25" disk sleeves with IBM on them, bring back a few memories.

[@ntcrwler]

Great documentary! thank you so much. Brings back many font memories of high school and college

[@skonkfactory]

You referred to Digital Research as "Digital", which is confusing since "Digital" usually refers to Digital Equipment Corporation. Digital Research were normally referred to as DR, as opposed to Digital Equipment Corporation, which was referred to as Digital or DEC.

[@bobblum5973]

As a Sysadmin and network guru on OpenVMS and related hardware since about 1986, I too definitely noticed the abbreviated naming of Digital Research. Digital Equipment Corp. needs to be remembered better for all its contributions to computers and networking technologies.

[@RMCRetro]

Thanks for the feedback, that's something I will try to be clearer about in future videos

[@bobblum5973]

@@RMCRetro No worries, that was just constructive feedback, clarifying what you'd said to make people aware of the differences. For example, it's like calling a 9-pin serial port connector a DB-9. Traditionally it was a DE-9, while the 25-pin one is a DB-25. Why? It's a "D-series" connector, with the backshell housing size coded as "E". So you'd have a DA-15, DB-25, DC-37, DE-50 and DE-9. Over time people tended to just refer to them as "DB" connectors regardless of backshell size. A VGA-style connector uses the same "E" backshell size, but has three rows of pins, so it's a high-density HD-15, smaller than a DA-15. [This concludes today's lesson on "The History of Connectors". ;) ]

[@MichaelTavares]

This is the kind of pedantry that keeps me on nerdy nostalgic KZbin

[@bobblum5973]

Replying to myself rather than editing: I typo'd "DE-50", it was supposed to be "DD-50" to continue the sequence. I always assumed the DA-15 had been the smallest size until they came up with the 9-pin one, so they had to go with the next letter for the "E" code.

[@saifal-badri]

This is a great video, thanks for all the effort making this. I have a sealed copy of the last pc dos that has ms code 5.0 and I will keep that one sealed 😂

[@yereverluvinuncleber]

Well done on the 100K!

[@leetylr]

Microsoft Millennium had always been and unstable OS and the MS-DOS 8.0 that was included, like the OS itself was a pain to use in more ways that one. Windows still had the shortcuts and preferences to run a DOS program and you could only boot into DOS directly via boot disk, with a few tweaks but Windows Millenniums dos version had a Protected memory program running at all times. You could not for example use programs or games that used memory extenders as they would refuse to run. Because of this and other problems a lot of people including me migrated back to Windows 98SE. The only program from Millennium I liked was the Defrag executable which I was able to copy into Windows 98 as the speed increased went up tenfold. A big shout out to RetroManCave for another interesting video, All the best Lee.

[@FlywithmeNetAu]

Awesome having an interactive video + chat with Neil present, makes for fun KZbin. Bought you a coffee, the conversion rate from AUD to GDP is scary right now.

[@Longlius]

As bad as I feel for Gary Kildall, he really screwed the pooch of his own accord here. A half-decade of being the top dog in the microcomputer world convinced him that he didn't have to take IBM seriously or that he wouldn't have competitors. How does a company like Digital not have a legal team on standby to hash-out contracts when the company executives are away? And it's not like Microsoft were some unknown either - their BASIC was on most micros of the day. Did Gary not imagine that Microsoft might conceivably make a move into the 16-bit micro space like they had with the 8-bits?

[@TheThirdFall]

Kildall had his demons, and Gates ran Microsoft professionally and in a way that IBM (then, as now, a very stuffy and bureaucratic company) could understand. Kildall ran DR in a much more relaxed way, The legend is that Kildall blew them off as his wife was worried about losing everything, but history seems to be kinder to Kildall these days, as he simply wasn't the ruthless businessman that Gates or Tremiel were. A Gates-Kildall partnership is still one of the great tech what-if stories.

[@mattePRL]

Gary Kildall! Damn, I know him from Computer Chronicles, but I wasn't aware of his background

[@ModMINI]

I had that computer on my desk when I worked in IT support for a consulting company in the late 1990s. It sucked back then too.

[@stanguay169]

I love this!! Yes more please! Xenix and more!

[@pheugo3664]

Great review. A lot of nostalgia

[@10minGameplay1]

It was nice when the OS had very little overhead.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

That was never true. Even the CP/M command processor was designed to allow part of itself to be overwritten by a program being executed. It would checksum itself afterwards to discover whether it needed to reload the overwritten part.

[@Ndlanding]

Actually the OS overhead was so high that many programs could not run without fiddling with LH, etc. Imagine having tons of extra (extended/expanded) memory which did not help at all, if the prog didn't fit into the space remaining from 640K.

[@billnopoles1934]

@@Ndlanding: An example I want to mention is Visual Basic 1. It needs so much of the fiddling, I cannot install it on a (Oracle) virtual machine.

[@nerrufam7105]

FreeDOS should release a big box with a fat manual. i like dos, fat manuals, and big boxes, but i will ONLY run Free Open Source Software!

[@ethnikLSD]

I run what I need, open source or not.... it's not the gear but the final results. I don't know nothing top quality as Ableton or Bitwig Studio....a lot of money is needed to create a professional workstation (don't tell me LMMS....LMMS is a calculator when Ableton is a spaceship, not a toy for nerds). Sorry but the open source is not better than commercial software, expecially when you need PROFESSIONAL stuff to work with, not nerdy stuff

[@alexrawson8492]

@@ethnikLSD Ardour though.

[@ethnikLSD]

@@alexrawson8492 Ard what? :D I'm talkig about professional stuff...

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

The manual and packaging were quite expensive to produce. After it became clear that nobody read manuals anyway, it became acceptable to drop them.

[@nerrufam7105]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 correct, though that was the case with OSs that had a GUI by default, like 95,98 and such. But if you were new to computing, you would not know nothing about using a pc (which in itself i think is better, there were no people that used PCs that didnt know how to use them, like today). You obviously dont need a manual to run win10.

[@Jimbaloidatron]

About 1990 I worked in a local government computer section, they had a variant of DOS by Digital Research called Concurrent DOS. You couldn't just walk on in and reboot a PC, or else two or three other workers with serial dumb terminals in the neighbouring offices would be swearing blue through the wall that their SuperCalc or WordPerfect session had just been killed. Would be interesting to see that resurrected once more; ideally need at least one old dumb terminal with a green or amber screen for the full experience, then have two people running DOS apps on the same PC at the same time, one on the PC, one on the terminal. I'm guessing only a very few well behaved apps could work that way?

[@razorsz195]

Oh my god i have that exact CTX CRT Monitor! Such a satisfying power button, They are fantastic and smooth, mine still going strong! Needs a retrobrite job ;)

[@whitewolf617]

Reminds me of when I had a PC running DOS 2.11. A much simpler time. >.> The computer was so simple, I couldn't even upgrade it when I was given upgrade disks.

[@AleksandarGrozdanoski]

From what I remember I was able to use that MS-DOS upgrade kit, which wasn't bootable on its own, on IBM DOS...

[@glitchwalker5422]

I miss getting a beefy manual like that, or any manual at all

[@PearComputingDevices]

Back in 1998 I was working for a company who was trying to lease OS/2 from IBM since by 1997 IBM gave up interest in the os and was of course in talks. IBM hardware was really good too at the time. But if you bought OS/2 warp 4.0 red or blue spine you still got IBM DOS within it... I bet your Apitvia would run 4.52 quite well. You could also strip away at Windows Me to get an unofficial Dos 8.0, but I don't know why anyone would.

[@TheStuffMade]

I remember Microsoft trying the pull the "Breaking this seal on the box means your agree to all our terms" on their MS-DOS boxes. Looks like IBM wasn't trying to be quite as draconian.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I think there was some Dell package which said that opening the package meant you agreed to the EULA which ... was inside the package.

[@Ndlanding]

Yeah, it's like those hammers in glass cases on trains, which say: "To access glass-breaking hammer, break glass."

[@316diag]

there are countless things more satisfying than opening software packaging. the next DSM should include Packaging Fetish Disorder.

[@Breakfast_of_Champions]

Are they still offering it as a free download? I can remember they did when PC-DOS went out of production long time ago. With a mix of this and some FreeDOS drivers and stuff you can probably still make a slick DOS environment.

[@andrewlankford9634]

FreeDOS.org ...for people who don't know what else to do with their time. Upside about using it is that unlike PC DOS, it's still maintained.

[@falkerhard]

Just remembered those awful times when Floppy was needed to boot. CD-ROM boot was a pipe dream.

[@noelj62]

Good look on the history of MSDOS. Thanks Neil.

[@GamingHistorySource]

You should only cut the plastic around the top so you can preserve the box with the wrapping.