MSDOS Support

[Dick Sundt]

Which is the latest edition of Windows that supports full-blown DOS-5? Need to hang on to my PCWrite and some allied stuff.

[Alfons]

Which is the latest edition of Windows that supports full-blown DOS-5? Need to hang on to my PCWrite and some allied stuff.
One OS doesn't really support another - you run with one at a time. I presume your question is whether Windows will actually support the DOS Applications that are of interest to you.

Windows 3.X most likely will, and W3.11, aka WFWG (Windows For Work Groups) can be made to operate on the internet.

With Windows 9X, you'd have to try each application to see if it's installable in that environment.

Windows 3.x used MS-DOS - up to version 6.22 which you installed separately, but with Windows 9X, you have an embedded DOS version 7.x.

[Landon]

I have tried running some programs that were written during the DOS era in everything from Win95a to WinMe, some run ok others just completely crash and will not run at all, it seems to entirely depend on the operating system in question.

Some programs will also run just fine on an old Pentium 1 system (I.E. Pentium 100, 120, 133, 166, 200, 233Mhz), but when ran on a Pentium II system (or higher) they crash with rather violent errors.

Try it and see is all I can really say.

As far as "PCWrite" goes (I am assuming that it is some kind of word processor) something you could do is save all the text files as "text files" (instead of a proprietary file type). Then put all the files on network storage then transfer them onto a Windows computer that is on the same network and then save them as MS-Word documents.

Good luck!

[oink]

Can I assume you have tried booting or restarting in dos on your win 95 and 98 machines as opposed to running in windows from a dos prompt?

[jtdoom]

hi

one thing's for sure.
For old Msdos based system utilities, you had better stick to FAT16 and the old style 12345678.123 filenaming system.

if you are not talking about system utilities...
some old DOS programs can get in trouble in systems with too much ram.
(I am talking about those apps that use expanded memory...like WP5.1)

I know some people have to maintain an old system because the documents they contain have to remain the way they was.
(original computer generated legal documents/court case material... where embedded remarks would get messed up or get completely lost/or the file's date/embedded datum (end sometimes the datum of the embedded notes) gets bitten by the millenium bug... upon conversion on a modern machine with a modern program that don't know the workings of the old versions...)

fwiw, MsDOS never got a millenium bugfix that I know of.

the people I know with that problem tell me that when old cases are re-opened (and it's usually serious stuff) these files have to be produced "untampered with".