By now, most Windows users are set up with decently functional machines running Windows 10 or 11. Of course there are a few legacy machines still lagging behind on Windows 7 or 8 and plenty of computers in industrial settings running ancient proprietary software on Windows XP. But only the most hardcore of IBM PC users are still running DOS, and if you have eschewed things like Unix for this command-line operating system this long you might want to try using it to get online in the Fediverse with Mastodon.
The first step is getting DOS 6.22, the most recent version released in 1994, set up with all the drivers and software needed to access the Internet. At the time of its release there were many networking options so the operating system didn’t include these tools by default. [Stephen] first sets up an emulated NE2000-compatible networking card and then installs the entire TCP/IP stack and then gets his virtual machine set up with an IP address.
With a working Internet connection set up, the next step on the path of exploring federated social media is to install DOStodon (although we might have favored the name “MastoDOS”) which is a Mastodon client specifically built for MS-DOS by [SuperIlu]. There are pre-compiled packages available on its GitHub page for easy installation in DOS but the source code is available there as well. And, if this is your first time hearing about the Fediverse, it is mostly an alternative to centralized social media like Facebook and Reddit but the decentralization isn’t without its downsides.
NE2000 compatible cards were all the rage if you wanted to get decent driver support under Linux.
Realtek RTL8139 was the winning chipset!
Realtek still is when one looks at all the modern boards that have it.
Insmod rtl8139.o or something I remember 😆
Oh neat. This would be super cute on a retro machine.
True, but not only there.
a) There’s a DOS community that runs DOS on Pentium II and III and beyond for a reason.
b) A lot of excellent productivity software runs on DOS and supports VGA in 640×480 and Super VGA resolutions.
Like STS Orbit Plus, a fine satellite tracker which simulates NASA’s Mission Control Center using vector graphics or SkyGlobe, an excellent astronomy program. Then there’s Deluxe Paint, Autodesk AutoCAD R10/Animator Pro/ 3D Studio R3/R4. Or for PCB/circuit design, OrCAD or Eagle etc.
c) Music programs like Adlib Tracker II need a lot of raw CPU power for the more complex OPL3 tunes. Same goes for MOD players/trackers on DOS, like Impulse Tracker (has MMX support). Some songs have 30+ channels that must be played and mixed in real-time or require an intelligent wavetable soundcard. A Pentium III isn’t too high-end here, it’s about right for good audio fidelity.
d) There are web-browsers like Arachne, which support VESA VBE modes upto 1600×1200 resolution. To make that run at least nearly smooth, a fast Pentium PC with a good PCI/AGP graphics card is required.
What I mean to say: DOS isn’t (wasn’t) just about CGA graphics on an rusty old IBM 5150 with 4,77 MHz, 256KB of RAM running DOS 2.11.
Before the 2010s, DOS was all about 486/Pentium and VGA graphics. The CGA and scanline craze is rather fresh. In the 90s, DOS programs were highly developed and aesthetically pleasing.
Heck, we had a virtual reality phase back in the mid-90s! Cheap shutter glasses were everywhere. Descent on DOS supported it, among other hardware (Forze VFX-1 rings a bell?). Standards like LCDBIOS even made it vendor-independant. Sadly, VR did made it.
Programs from Symantec and Central Point had used TUIs (text mode GUIs) that used custom VGA fonts to draw pretty window decorations. In color! See PC Tools 7. Or, let’s take WinBIOS, from the late 486 era. It had mouse support ages before UEFI was around.
Applications. For example, we had demanding emulators running under pure DOS, for multiple reasons. Say, because Windows 98 era hardware wasn’t providing best performance under Windows yet.
And/or because of the arcade cab scene. It wasn’t unheard to build arcades using PC hardware running DOS and MAME/MESS or any other DOS-based emulator (ZSNES, GENECYST, MEKA etc).
With homebrewed VGA cables, an 15 KHz CRT monitor could be directly, natively driven by a VGA card. In low-res modes not supported by Windows. All it needed was a DOS utility.
https://www.geocities.ws/podernixie/htpc/cables-en.html
*Sadly, VR did *not* made it.
FreeDOS and OpenGEM or PC/GEOS (FreGEOS) still try to further develop DOS as a platform. It ain’t dead yet. There are modern DOS drivers just recently being written, for use on modern hardware with PCI/PCIe bus. Just think of HDD drivers with UDMA support (FreeDOS), USB drivers or new memory managers..
Thanks! Didn’t know about adlib tracker – must try it!
Trackers are great (both old ones like fast tracker AXS and new one like Renoise). They deserve good article on HAD – they gave powerfull production tools to many people. I remember playing XM files that had 20 tracks on pentium MMX with 32MB RAM and they were created long before MMX era and maybe even Pentium era. Some interesting musicians used to start with trackers.
Any Lemmy clients for DOS?
6.22? Hah! Luddites… everyone should be running MS-Dos 7.1 (stripped out of a windows 98) by now. Or maybe even MS-Dos 8. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sBKhB1La3w)
+non-system tools from FreeDOS and Unix tools from Borland distribution…
What about DR-DOS 6, Novell DOS 7, Caldera DOS, PC-DOS 7, PC-DOS 2000, Real/32, FreeDOS, ROM-DOS, PTS DOS et cetera? MS-DOS wasn’t the only DOS in town.. DOS was a family of OSes, it had many flavors, not much unlike Linux has.
Used Dr Dos for an mp3 player in the late 90’s on a 486 really should re look at it again loved the multi tasking on it.
[quote]
“At the time of its release there were many networking options so the operating system didn’t include these tools by default. ”
[/quote]
For the newbies around here:
Back in those days drivers were not included in the OS.
If you wanted to print something, you were dependent on the vendor of each individual software package to deliver a driver for your printer.
So:
* Your text editor needs a printer driver.
* Your word processor needs a printer driver.
* Your graphic program needs a printer driver.
* Etc…
And also for other drivers.
If you had software that used graphics on your monitor, you had to install a driver for your video card in each and every program that used graphics manually.
And drivers were much less standardized too.
I remember wanting to have a PCB manufactured, and then you had to select between 100 or so different Gerber plotter drivers, while you did not even know what sort of plotter your manufacturer has. And it was from before Internet existed, so there was no website nor forum to get questions answered.
I did manage to get my PCB manufactured. I copied the files onto two different floppy disks (because those were unreliable too) and then transported those floppy disks on my own bicycle to a local PCB manufacturer. Then I was invited into the office, he opened some software and read my floppies, and asked me if the PCB did look all right. This visual confirmation was an important step.
Oooo a _PCB Manufacturer_! I was still using marker pen and ferric chloride as late as 1987.
As a hobbyist I had a second hand HP penplotter, adjust everything for the right penwidth and convert to HPGL files. Use new pens with water resistant ink and plot directly on the pcb glued to a piece of plotting paper. I wrote a small program in borland C to dump everything to the (also second hand) NI GPIB interface. Sometimes you had to it a few times to get a good coverage and hoping everything stayed lined out between plots. Later we got those fancy milling plotters in the office I was allowed to use sometimes.
“And it was from before Internet existed, so there was no website nor forum to get questions answered.”
Well, yes and no. There was “internet”. It existed since the days of Arpanet. If you were a student at university, you had access to internet in the 80s already (it just wasn’t being open for public before the 90s; universities and research centers in general were not affected). You could send e-mail and messages etc.
To mortals, there was CompuServe since the 80s, it was a popular place to talk about IT problems. It had a CB simulator (chatroom). Then there was Fidonet, a large mailbox/BBS network. Or Prodigy, Promenade, Quantum Link (Q-Link). Or AOL (early 90s). In Europe we had Videotex services (BTX, Minitel). Here in Germany, we had Datex-P service, which gave access to the international X.25 network.
So yeah, the masses didn’t have “internet” access back then. But saying we weren’t online isn’t right. The 80s and 90s were full of wonders and breakthroughs in telecommunications. Just think of ISDN or video telephony. It was possible way back in ~1992, without any “internet”.
We had computer magazines, too and fax devices. And pagers. And car phones. And online services (CompuServe, AOL, T-online etc). They all were around independently from the internet. We didn’t miss out nearly as much as it seems. It weren’t tge dark ages whatsoever. I was there, I remember what I saw. 🙂
“For the newbies around here:
Back in those days drivers were not included in the OS.
If you wanted to print something, you were dependent on the vendor of each individual software package to deliver a driver for your printer.”
True, but you’re missing a point here my son. :)
There existed industry standards, even way back then.
HPGL and PCL (sucessor) were a very common printer language which most printers understood. Same goes for EPSON standard when it comes to matrix-printers.
HPGL (print to file) was even used as an intermediate format, like DXF. Or GIF ’87/GUF’89, later on.
Back in the day, DOS programs either supported a couple of popular printers and/or the printer itself had an emulation mode.
Also, printers like HP Laserjet Plus had font cardridges to support fonts in hardware. That’s another little detail here.
The use of scalable software fonts wasn’t popular on PC before Windows 3.0, when Adobe released its Adobe Type Manager (ATM, also found in Win-OS/2). It wasn’t before Windows 3.1 that Windows shipped with TrueType font support, which rivaled ATM and finally replaced ATM.
Nope, I did not miss that.
There were some standards, and to keep it on topic: “NE2000 compatible” was a good first guess for network cards. And even of those standards you mention were evolving so there were variants and incompatibilities.
Also,
I seriously doubt you are my daddy. You may have the age (that would be 103 years now) but not the genetics. He also never touched a computer in his whole life.
“Nope, I did not miss that.
There were some standards, and to keep it on topic: “NE2000 compatible” was a good first guess for network cards. And even of those standards you mention were evolving so there were variants and incompatibilities.”
They were evolving, yes, but stayed mostly backwards compatible.
I still can’t help but think you’re thinking of DOS days in a bit of a superficial, stereotypical way, though (“640K ought to be enough for anybody” or “beam me up, Scotty”). As if everything was severely limited back then and better now, which contradicts my experience as a loyal DOS user. Most people nowadays think like that way, I suppose. 🤷♂️ That’s why I’d like to share my point of view, if you don’t mind.
PCL printers were backwards compatible with HPGL software, for example.
VGA supported older CGA, EGA and MCGA modes. Most ISA VGAs had extended hardware-support for Hercules graphics and CGA registers compatibility (both used Motorola CRTC).
To enable that hardware feature, a mode utility supplied on the original disks of the graphics cards must be used, though. Without that, CGA compatibility is/was just superficial. It has to be, otherwise the card couldn’t be called 100% VGA compatible (VGA quirks had to be included).
Of course, those who got cheap, beaten down second-hand 486 PCs never had seen these disks to original begin with. All they had was a pirated copy of MS-DOS and sone games. Maybe Windows 3, too, running in Standard VGA in 640×480 16c at flickery 60 Hz.
To them, DOS experience was very mediocre. They must rarely ever saw the professional, high-performance side with Super VGA, networking, good memory management (QEMM) and a graphical GUI (Norton Commander, GEM, DESQView etc).
Btw, the grapbics card’s driver disks also contained other utilities (font utilities, monitor refresh rate tools) and drivers for Autodesk software (ADI drivers), GEM, Windows 2.x, Windows/386, Windows 3.0, Ventura Publisher, OrCAD, Borland etc.
And a VESA VBE driver. That’s something you didn’t mention, at all, by the way: The existence of VBE. While VBE itself may not have been super popular, it provided a basis for universal drivers. Programs supporting graphics drivers could make use indirect use of VESA VBE. SVADI is such one. It provides high-resolutions modes for Autodesk Software, like AutoSketch.
Then, there were *.BGI drivers for Borland programs. Programs written in Turbo C or Turbo Pascal could use any graphics hardware automatically, if a suitable BGI driver was in the application folder. A Super VGA version existed, too.
Last, but not least, many Super VGA drivers (Windows 3.1x, PC GEOS etc) had direct-chipset support (PVGA1A, ET4000, S3, Realtek, Cirrus), but also a fallback for VESA VBE. It was used if everything else failed.
Hardware was similar. Serial ports were backwards compatible (16550A FiFo to 8250 and 16450), sound cards had Sound Blaster/Pro compatibility, OPL3 was backwards compatible to OPL2.
Centronics ports had multiple modes that could be set in CMOS Setup Utility (≠ BIOS), mice had support for their native protocol as well as MS Mouse and Mouse Systems.
And HD floppy drives could read DD floppies, IDE HDDs used same protocol/language as MFM/RLL controllers found in IBM AT (WD100x). Then there were Turbo button, A20 line et cetera.
“Also,
I seriously doubt you are my daddy. You may have the age (that would be 103 years now) but not the genetics. He also never touched a computer in his whole life.”
Dear girl, -err-, boy, that was meant as a joke, please don’t mind.
As a friendly side blow (right English wording?) so to say.
In a way like a priest would talk to one of his “sheep”. :)
Anyway, you’re too young to know, maybe. These days people nolonger use this kind of speech.
Why do you keep repeating me?
And DOS was usable back then, but mostly because we didn’t know any better. Hardware compatibility was also near to mandatory, just to limit the amount of drivers all software vendors had to support. Can you imagine going back to such a platform that now without going crazy? Back then we were happy with a dot matrix printer and a small VGA monitor. Buying the biggest and best monitor I could afford has been a recurring task back then.
PC upgrades were also mandatory every 2 years if you could afford it, or 3 to 5 years depending on what your budget allows. My previous PC was a gift I got for free, and the main reason I upgraded about 10 years later was that I wanted my PC to support a 107cm 4k monitor. (I love 4k or higher resolutions, but those small pixels on those tiny 24″ monitors are just silly).
And I’m no sheep neither. Just send that priest of yours to some orphanage to get some young boys and save them sheep from sexual abuse.
Digging through my back room yesterday, an unopened package of DOS 6.22. What are the odds?
I’m using a DOS emulator in Linux Mint for some legacy DOS-based programs but it’s not as functional as terminal mode in Linux.
We use Dosbox to run some legacy software at work. The serial port emulation/pass-through works very well and is very easy to set up.
FWIW, we added a whole Retro Computing section to the list of third party apps on the joinmastodon website recently – you might find some software for your classic systems! https://joinmastodon.org/apps
The real question is can it run NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) telnet
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Telnet
1994 binaries for MSDOS:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160717214513/ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Telnet/DOS/tel2308b.zip
1994 source code:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160717214513/ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Telnet/DOS/tel2308s.zip
Or slip:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Line_Internet_Protocol
But that was when the Internet already existed, so must be from a later age.
In the DOS age it was mostly BBS systems, but I could not afford to have an open phone connection for hours. Land lines were paid for by the time used here in Europe. I believe that USA had flat rate for local calls much earlier then in Europe.
I was thinking more along the lines of the first connection to online M.U.D.’s (e.g. telnet anguish.org 2222). Where university students would play online text based MultiUser Dungeons, while pretending to write code in computer labs.
I’m loving the way-back vibe on DOS-era computing. Fond memories of saving up to get my Racal-Vadik external modem (and KDS? EGA monitor). Which eventually failed off-hook, so had to have it’s own switch. Added enough wait to the Hayes commands so the modem had time to init after toggling the power. Oh, those ISA cards. They always felt so tactile. BBSes and local meetups were very popular back then. Rather a shame that APCUG is all but dead (American PC Users Group)
The most recent version of Dos is IBM PC Dos 7.1/2000