On 23/01/2014 03:20 PM, Warp wrote:
> Orchid Win7 v1<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> Did you know that your graphics card starts up emulating an
>> IBM-manufactured video board from 27 years ago? And then you have to run
>> special driver software to turn off all the pointless emulation and put
>> the card into 24-bit, memory-mapped mode at a real-world screen
>> resolution. Go figure...
>
> In theory a modern PC ought to be completely backwards-compatible with
> the 16-bit PCs and thus, in theory, you ought to be able to run MS-DOS
> in a modern PC. (All the required hardware is still there, most of it
> artificially dragging the old technology for backwards compatibility,
> the BIOS still supports all the system calls used by DOS, etc.)
> However, I would be *really* surprised if you actually got MS-DOS
> running natively on a modern PC.

Oh I don't know... It'll probably work.

> There are many hurdles that you'll encounter. Firstly, you'll need a
> hard drive that's small and old enough that MS-DOS will actually be able
> to use it.

I suspect so long as it isn't native 4K sectors, it'll just be reported 
as 2GB.

> Also, you'll need a PS/2 keyboard because MS-DOS has no idea
> what USB is.

Many PCs have a BIOS option for PS/2 emulation. That is, to make a USB 
keyboard appear to be a PS/2 one.

> There are also probably many problems you will encounter
> due to the fact that your CPU is so damn fast.

Hell yes!

> The thing is, nobody runs MS-DOS natively anymore, and haven't done so
> for well over a decade.

I'm pretty sure the in-store management system that John Lewis use is 
still DOS-based. (Whether it's running natively or in some emulation 
layer is another matter...)

> If you really need to run an old DOS program
> you'll use DOSBox anyway. Not only will the program work, it's a million
> times less hassle.
>
> So why is the PC architecture dragging all the useless stuff for MS-DOS
> compatibility, when nobody's running MS-DOS anyway?

No idea. Presumably because it would mean changing stuff?

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