• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

DOS 5.0 on IBM 5150

B

bettablue

Veteran Member
Joined
Feb 21, 2011
Messages
1,647
Location
Eugene, OR
Is the 5150 powerful enough to run DOS 5 and it's GUI? Where can I get an electronic copy of the DOS 5.0 manual?

As always, thank you.
 
The 5150 is capable of running DOS 5.0 at the command line at least, but be aware that the more recent versions of DOS uses more memory than the older versions. When it comes to DOSSHELL, I've never really tried but I guess it should run. Heck, even Windows 3.0 runs on an 5150.
 
bobba84 said:
Hi Thomas! :)

www.loonage.com/users/bobby/dos5.zip

Bobby.
Click to expand...

Excellent! This will do nicely. Thanks Bobby.

Per... I know there is a pretty big hit in memory use with the higher versions of DOS. With that said, I've been playing with adding memory to one of my 5150 machines, which is running with an XT-CF Lite rev 4 board installed. With that in mind, I want to play with the different DOS versions, and DOS shell programs to get the optimal setup for these machines. Don't worry, if I don't like what I see, and the memory usage is too high to run a good word processor, along with the GUI, then I'll try something else. So far, DOS 33 with Menu Works 2.10 seems to work best. But I still want to try DOS 5 and it's GUI, just for sh_ts and giggles..
 
bettablue said:
I know there is a pretty big hit in memory use with the higher versions of DOS.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you mean by that. I've not found a big difference in memory usage. Where the difference occurs is with the OS size - particularly when using a floppy. On a 360k you can run into trouble with the newer versions. Here is an abbreviated list of OS sizes. I'm assuming the use of COMMAND.COM.

DOS 6.0 - 131,533 bytes
DOS 5.0 - 118,669 bytes
DOS 3.2 - 77,793 bytes
DOS 2.1 - 39,552 bytes

As for memory footprint, vwestlife gave us a nice list a little while ago:
PC DOS 2.00 ... 630,672 bytes
PC DOS 2.10 ... 630,672
PC DOS 3.10 ... 616,432
MS-DOS 3.10 ... 616,432
PC DOS 3.21 ... 609,392
PC DOS 3.30 ... 600,528
MS-DOS 3.30 ... 600,368
IBM DOS 5.00 ... 593,328
MS-DOS 5.00 ... 593,328
MS-DOS 6.00 ... 592,256
IBM DOS 6.10 ... 593,056
MS-DOS 6.22 ... 592,256
PC DOS 6.30 ... 593,024
PC DOS 7.00 Revision 0 ... 593,840
PC DOS 2000 (7.00 Revision 1) ... 593,760
Click to expand...

You can see that there is only 38,344 bytes difference between DOS 2.1 and DOS 5.0. On a 64K machine that is significant but if you have 640K it hardly matters.
 
I would hardly call DosShell a GUI. :) But that's me.

There's a program that will allow some UMBs on a PC or XT. That will let you load some stuff high. It's called USE!UMBS.
 
bettablue said:
I'm interested... That might be fun to somehow add in another 360 Kb to fill out the 1 MB that the 5150, and 5160 is supposedly capable of handling. Hmm.
Click to expand...
It won't give you 384K... but it might give you some more wiggle room. Only certain memory areas can be addressed with this.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top