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Windows 1 or 2

I have Windows 1 and 2 just to dink around with them and play Reversi every once in awhile. The first encounter I had with one of these versions of Windows was 10 years ago on an IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 with a bad floppy drive that a college professor needed a file off of, it was Windows/286.

My 8088's both have Windows 1.01 installed on them, and the 286 has 2-3.1 on it. The only one I really use for anything substantial is Windows 3.1.
 
I've been using sled on my tandy. It's small and fast and fairly featureful. Though I'd drop it for a second for a good vi clone. Any recommendations?
 
I've never installed my Windows v1.xx from the Collegiate Kit software for my PS/2 Model 25... It's on the to-do list :) As for the text editor... there's only one choice for me - an old shareware editor called Softkey Editor v1.4. Registration took you to version 2.1, and was only $20, but to a young teenager in rural Florida, that might as well have been $1000. I remember downloading it at the public library from a shareware collection CD, and then using it for years afterwards running off of floppy at the computers at school, and then later, at my own computer.

It was great because it used "ribbon" menus at the bottom of the screen providing you with dozens of extra features and options including a calculator, a pop-up ASCII chart, macros, and even in-line special characters that I used for line-drawing in the batch-based system menus I used to create as I didn't like the memory overhead from shelling out of traditional menu systems like x-tree, direct access, etc. One of the coolest features was that it had built-in safeguards preventing you from closing the app or file if you hadn't saved it - back in 1988, that was a pretty nice feature to have, and one I think we all take for granted now.

fwiw, it can still be downloaded at http://cd.textfiles.com/pcsig08/801_900/DISK0880/ - Trust me, it's WELL worth the look.
 
Thanks everyone for providing me with your choices for text editors. I am collecting all of them and will be trying each in turn. So, as editors go, please keep them coming. The more I have, the better as far as I'm concerned. I'll be checking for copywrite on these too, because once I have tested them I'll be adding those without protection to my web page at allthingsdos.com. We'll have these and other programs in the downloads sections as we add more content.

Again, thanks and keep them coming.
 
Cheesy is right, but this is exactly the kind of thing I want for my web site. Are there any more similar to this? There is one that covers DOS 5.0, and it was just as cheesy, but I love the video just the same.

vwestlife said:
Windows/386 2.x could indeed run DOS applications in a window, as Microsoft demonstrated in this incredibly cheesy promo video:

Click to expand...
 
Not sure when edit.com became included but it was certainly all I used for normal editing of files or batch files. Of course it was the same editor as qbasic. Prior to that I believe the default was edlin.
 
bettablue said:
Unfortunately, edit.com doesn't work with DOS 3.3. At least I haven't seen a version of edit.com that does so far. But, if you happen to have such a beast, can you point me to where I can get it please?
Click to expand...

EDIT.COM launches QBASIC with an option switch. I have never tried copying QBASIC onto a DOS 3.3 install but you will need it in order to do anything with MS-DOS EDIT.

For something very similar to EDIT, try FreeDOS's EDIT.EXE at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/edit/
 
Here's another thought. After re-watching the DOS 5 video (and yes, it is definitely out there!) I started wondering. Will DOS 5.0 install on an 8088 machine and work? Or is it as I suspect, too large for the 640Kb memory limitations?
 
krebizfan said:
EDIT.COM launches QBASIC with an option switch. I have never tried copying QBASIC onto a DOS 3.3 install but you will need it in order to do anything with MS-DOS EDIT.
Click to expand...

The MS-DOS 6.22 version of EDIT and QBASIC both run fine on Tandy MS-DOS 3.3. (I think DOS 6.x removed a lot of the strict version checks that DOS 5.0 used.)

However, all EDIT does is simply call QBASIC.EXE with the undocumented /EDCOM switch. So you could easily write an EDIT.BAT file to take its place:

EDIT.BAT said:
@QBASIC /EDCOM %1 %2 %3 %4 %5
Click to expand...

Note that the /EDCOM switch must be typed in all-caps in order for it to work.

bettablue said:
Here's another thought. After re-watching the DOS 5 video (and yes, it is definitely out there!) I started wondering. Will DOS 5.0 install on an 8088 machine and work? Or is it as I suspect, too large for the 640Kb memory limitations?
Click to expand...
All versions of DOS (up to and including MS-DOS 6.22 and PC DOS 7.0/2000) will boot and run fine on an 8088 with 640K.

Microsoft made MS-DOS 6.22 available on a set of 13 :eek: 5.25" 360K disks, and if you have enough patience, you can even install it on an original IBM 5150 PC if you want to.
 
Last edited:
bettablue said:
Here's another thought. After re-watching the DOS 5 video (and yes, it is definitely out there!) I started wondering. Will DOS 5.0 install on an 8088 machine and work? Or is it as I suspect, too large for the 640Kb memory limitations?
Click to expand...
??? What 640k memory limitations? I use DOS 5 on my XT with 256k with no problems.
 
Exactly my point. I hate edlin. It's not really all that useful. Which is why I want to find a replacement. Edit.com came out with DOS 5 or 6. When you try to run it under a previous version all you get is an error that the file or command is not compatible.

barythrin said:
Not sure when edit.com became included but it was certainly all I used for normal editing of files or batch files. Of course it was the same editor as qbasic. Prior to that I believe the default was edlin.
Click to expand...
 
Thank you. I'll try this.

vwestlife said:
The MS-DOS 6.22 version of EDIT and QBASIC both run fine on Tandy MS-DOS 3.3. (I think DOS 6.x removed a lot of the strict version checks that DOS 5.0 used.)

However, all EDIT does is simply call QBASIC.EXE with the undocumented /EDCOM switch. So you could easily write an EDIT.BAT file to take its place:



Note that the /EDCOM switch must be typed in all-caps in order for it to work.


All versions of DOS (up to and including MS-DOS 6.22 and PC DOS 7.0/2000) will boot and run fine on an 8088 with 640K.

Microsoft made MS-DOS 6.22 available on a set of 13 :eek: 5.25" 360K disks, and if you have enough patience, you can even install it on an original IBM 5150 PC if you want to.
Click to expand...
 
DOS 5 will use slightly more memory on a 8086 than DOS 3.3, about 8kB more. Additional memory will be used by the resident portion of DOSSHELL when launching a different program. I think that was 16kB or less. If the program barely fits under DOS 3.3, DOS 5 will not run it on an 8086 but most programs will not have a problem. Note: Bad things will happen if you try and use DOS 5's task switcher while also running Windows. If you use Windows, don't also use the DOS 5 shell.

Now, DOS 4's graphical shell was much larger in terms of resident memory consumption and would preclude many programs from running especially if also using a network redirector. I think that configuration ran to less than 400kB free.
 
bettablue said:
Exactly my point. I hate edlin. It's not really all that useful. Which is why I want to find a replacement. Edit.com came out with DOS 5 or 6. When you try to run it under a previous version all you get is an error that the file or command is not compatible.
Click to expand...

As far as I know this is only a problem with the DOS 5 version of EDIT and QBASIC. I have the MS-DOS 6.22 versions running just fine in MS-DOS 3.3. In fact quite a few of the newer DOS utilities like MOVE, DELTREE, MSD, etc. can be run in 3.3. (DEFRAG won't run in 3.3, but it's just a renamed copy of Norton Utilities' SPEEDISK, which runs perfectly!)
 
Right, so I guess you haven't seen the video of the DOS 5 upgrade that uses a graphical interface then. Check out this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfpYrem94q0.

Cheesy video, but kinda fun to watch from a historic perspective. I don't know if this functionality ever became available. I had just assumed that DOS 5.0 had all of this when it was released.

Stone said:
??? Graphic interface? It's DOS! You know, a black screen with 25 lines of white letters. :)
Click to expand...
 
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