How to experience 86-DOS?

86-DOS is a "quick and dirty" operating system clone of CP/M created by Seattle Computer Products for their 8086 S-100 systems. It was later bought by Microsoft and used as the basis for IBM PC-DOS and MS-DOS. Sadly, it cannot be emulated by any software we have installed so far. Thankfully, there exist an emulator, which is very tiny in size and we can run 86-DOS on it.

You can Download them here:

• 86DOS Linux version
• 86DOS Windows version

Using 86-DOS

It is very easy to start using 86-DOS. On Linux, extract the above archive and right click on the 86dos.sh file and choose "Run as a Program" or run the shell file the way you run any other shell file. On Windows, extract the above archive and double click the Runme.bat file. The Virtual Machine will start.

Press Enter (↩) until a prompt appears and then type a capital "B" without quotes and press Enter (↩) to start 86DOS.

Enter a date from 1980s to continue. You should not enter dates after year 2000 due to a bug in almost all software released before that year. For example, enter 03-23-82 and press Enter(↩). 86-DOS will start. You can enter the DIR command to see a list of available files.

That's it! We used 86-DOS, an operating system launched in 1981 after 41 years (at the time of writing this tutorial).

Manuals

• 86-DOS Instruction Manual
• 86-DOS Programmer's Manual
• 86-DOS User's Manual
• 86-DOS 1.0 Addendum

Related Pages

• WinWorld Page
• Wikipedia
• BetaWiki
• Tim Paterson's Site (Wayback Machine)
• Tim Paterson's Blog

Credits

The emulator which is linked above was created by Peter Schorn. You can visit his website to download the original emulator and lots of other software.