Which flavor of DOS for my XT?

[sqpat]

Wow. thanks for the great bunch of responses. From what I gather, I think PC DOS 3.3 sounds great for now, and I might pick up MS-DOS 5.0, or 6.x once I start wanting to use some more of that RAM or try to do some development.

 

[tezza]

I guess it depends what you want to do with the machine. As with others here, the DOS I would choose is MS-DOS 3.3.

It's probably what most people ended up using on their XT (and clones) back in the day.

Tez

 

[Jorg]

Like I said, Compaq DOS 3.31 supports >32MB partitions (all other versions didn't get that until 4.x). At the time, it was widely used on non-Compaq machines for that reason. Jorg might be right about it being 3.30 and not 3.31; I can't remember for sure. There were several revisions of it (which is what the letter designations indicate).

No, you were right, I looked it up, it is 3.31 that supports > 32 MB partitions.
The 3.30R I have is a special version for 'DOS in ROM for Toshiba laptops'

There is no PC DOS 3.31, so I won't run it anyway

I guess it depends what you want to do with the machine. As with others here, the DOS I would choose is MS-DOS 3.3.
Tez

Psst.. its an 5160...so it will spit out MS-DOS disks. PC DOS!

 

[Raven]

My personal favorite version of all the MS-DOS variants I've tried is MS-DOS 2.10. It's solid, simple, and compared to memory hogs like DOS 5/6 (lol...) it's very lightweight, which can be important depending on your system specs (mine has 256KB of ram, so yeah..)

2.10 doesn't support 3.5" floppies, and has limited support for hard drives (though in a machine of the appropriate age for the OS, that shouldnt be a problem).

3.3 is the minimum version for 3.5" HD 1.44mb floppies, so if you want those you must go with at least that.

What I ended up doing is sysing MS-DOS 6.22 from a 360K floppy onto my hard disk, then copying the essential files aside from the system bit by bit on 360K floppies, and then my programs that I was hauling around in a box of 360K floppies (as you may have guessed, I had only 360K floppy drives for this beast).

DOS 6.22 is probably one of the most stable and useful versions of DOS out there, but it's much more memory hungry than other versions. For this reason, while my HDD boots DOS 6.22, when I am going to play games that require more resources, I have a very minimal DOS 2.10 (or 2.11, can't recall) boot disk for that.

As well, (though this is a personal preference, and really more shell-related) I prefer the prompt as "A>", or "C>", omitting the colon and slash, i.e., "A:\>" and "C:\". DOS 2 has that style, while 6.22 has the newer one.

 

[Chuck(G)]

As well, (though this is a personal preference, and really more shell-related) I prefer the prompt as "A>", or "C>", omitting the colon and slash, i.e., "A:\>" and "C:\". DOS 2 has that style, while 6.22 has the newer one.

How about just using

PROMPT $N$G$S

in 6.22?

 

[Ole Juul]

Raven: As well, (though this is a personal preference, and really more shell-related) I prefer the prompt as "A>", or "C>", omitting the colon and slash, i.e., "A:\>" and "C:\". DOS 2 has that style, while 6.22 has the newer one.

I think you misunderstood the prompt in 6.22. It is user defined. The standard prompt has 13 variables. You type it in at the prompt or in autoexec.

For example, I like an easy to read screen (as well as having strange tastes!) so I prefer to use green text but have my prompt in red. It looks really nice and clean. Here is my "prompt": $e[31;40;1m$p $$$e[32;40;1m try it you'll like it. Of course you need an ANSI driver for that to work.

 

[Chuck(G)]

For example, I like an easy to read screen (as well as having strange tastes!) so I prefer to use green text but have my prompt in red. It looks really nice and clean. Here is my "prompt": $e[31;40;1m$p $$$e[32;40;1m try it you'll like it. Of course you need an ANSI driver for that to work.

Indeed--I've seen prompts that display the date and time as well as the path at the top of the screen in a different color.

The only thing that I wished DOS prompt could do was execute a program and pipe the output to the prompt.

 

[Ole Juul]

"Prompt" was introduced with DOS version 2.0 as an internal command.

One can, of course, display any text eg. "prompt MyComputer", but for those that are new to this commmand here are some other common ones. Type "prompt" followed by $t for time, $d for date, $v for version number, or even $_ to put the cursor on the next line, eg $d$_. You can string these together.

 

[Lutiana]

In DOS 6.0 - 6.22, you can type

 Help Prompt

and get a great help file on all the options, well all the options built into the prompt command.

 

[Anonymous Coward]

DOS 3.31 is probably the way to go if you keep your XT in stock condition. If you later plan to add a LIM 4.0 EMS card, I recommend PC DOS 2000 or OpenDOS 7.01. I currently run PC DOS, but supposedly OpenDOS lets you do EMS task switching...which in my opinion is pretty damn cool.