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JetScootr t1_ja2xpob wrote

Reply to comment by speculatrix in ELI5: in MS-DOS there were not-interchangeable audio cards and we had to manually select it to get sound, otherwise there was none at all. When and why this stopped being a problem? by 3RBlank

>DOS was barely an operating system, in the true sense

Everything you said is correct, but perhaps you're underplaying just how limited the hardware was in the DOS days. DOS, and its forerunner CPM, were squeezed down into (sometimes) as little as 4 or 8 thousand bytes of RAM, plus about that much ROM (not kilobytes. ANd what's a megabyte?).

PS before I start a flame war: CPM was the conceptual forerunner of QDos, which was the actual code forerunner of MS Dos.

PPS before my PS starts a flame war:QDOS

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speculatrix t1_ja2y85t wrote

Yes, I know. I lived through that.

At one time I was writing assembler for four bit microcontrollers.

My first computer had 4K of RAM, and 8K of ROM and cassette tape storage.

My smart watch has millions of times more flash/rom.

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