?) @wyatt8740@tech.lgbtWhat did people do back in the day to manage changing CONFIG.SYS files around? - Before DOS 6 when the menu commands were introduced. I ask because PC-9800 series MS-DOS 6.20 doesn't seem to have the boot menu capability of western DOS.
I wrote a batch script [gitlab.com] but it feels like this is a task a lot of people would have had to do at some point and there might be a popular tool for it. #DOS #msdos #pcdos #pc98
@wyatt8740 As I recall, it was mostly having multiple floppies.
?) @wyatt8740@foeclan That'd work. But only if booting from floppy.
I guess it didn't matter as much in the west, but drive lettering depends on what you boot from on the PC-98. Whatever you boot from, whether HDD or floppy or whatever, becomes drive A:.
@wyatt8740 my (unofficial) dos 5 book has a script that does basically the same thing as yours, that is using copy to change the config/autoexec pair. i'm sure magazines back then each had their own special variant of that
on the pc-98, you could have multiple (up to 16) installations of dos, each with a different config/autoexec/version, and use the ipl selection menu. i suppose some people back then would have used that, since hdformat does make a copy of dos on new partitions by default.
@wyatt8740 honestly?
before dos 6 a lot of people didnt even have hard drives, so it wasnt an issue.
different config.sys? different floppy.
im not saying that no config.sys changer existed. config.sys wasnt locked, i dont think dos had file locking.
you changed config.sys by switching floppies. by the time people had hard drives, dos 6 existed.
also i played with the menu thing but i doubt a large percentage of people did. they were installing windows and didnt need to fuck around with that stuff.
then a few more years later win95 made the config.sys menu obsolete too. win95 could reboot into dos mode with various configurations.
@monsieuricon@social.kernel.org?) @wyatt8740@monsieuricon sounds hard to remember those names. Or like it wouldn't scale well... :p
@monsieuricon@social.kernel.org?) @wyatt8740@monsieuricon I had to make three so far: one for windows 3.1 and SCSI CD-ROM drivers to load, one for most games, and one for a specific game that needed mouse.sys and himem.sys and emm386 and mouse.com loaded at boot. :p
Admittedly this is on a PC-9801 rather than an IBM compatible.
@monsieuricon@social.kernel.org?) @wyatt8740@monsieuricon I learned to program first on an unexpanded VIC-20 with only a datasette drive... so I'm not entirely unfamiliar with that stuff. Also got an AT&T 6300 (Olivetti M24) 8086 PC here with 360KB floppy drives :)