On Tue, 1 Dec 2020, Eric Auer wrote:
Tom is neither, but you could argue that he could use more modern, more advanced editors for DOS, with higher text mode resolutions.
Win9x's edit.com will run under unusual and unorthodox screen resolutions, and edits up to 9 files at a time. When MS-DOS and Win32 were still my native platform, that was my editor of choice.
On the other hand, his impressive FreeDOS development track record shows that cross-compiling from another system or using DOS in a window while using another host operating system for the rest of your activities does not keep you from being productive DOS-wise :-)
This. And this is the advantage of Watcom C: you can compile to 16-bit DOS (or to Windows, or to OS/2) from Linux, and you can still compile to DOS from DOS.
I think it is an important point that ancient machines are no longer widespread. There is little use in having a 640k, 16-bit scandisk or defrag for FAT32, if nobody has managed to connect a large disk to such ancient hardware. So it is fine for me that dosfsck needs a 386 to check FAT32 partitions.
For what it's worth, when I want to get my retro on, I have a PS/2 Model 30/286. Because I was worried about the proprietary HD failing, I installed an XTCF and put a 2 GB CompactFlash card in line with the original drive (also, 20 MB just isn't enough).
People today seem to be more worried about the other end of the spectrum: Why is DOS limiting them to 2 TB disk size or 3 GB of RAM, running on only 1 of their 16 CPU cores? Not that I would know ANY application for DOS which would need that kind of power, I agree that people wonder whether DOS *may* use it, now that the 2020 PC on their desk has it anyway :-)
Although it would be nice to do a "DOS-64", and I've thought about ways to develop a DOS-like operating system for 64-bit PCs that no longer have BIOS, I think for a lot of these people, they may be served better by Linux.
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