Tonyka tests DR-DOS 6.0

Date: 1991

Snippet
From: tonyka Thu Sep 19 18:44:04 1991 To: tomle Cc: brentk; dosdev; jefflo; vangard Subject: DR-DOS 6.0 Testing (9/19)

DR DOS beats us on a 386 system by 12,560 bytes conventional; their EMM386 is a combined XMS provider and expanded memory manager. I don't understand why MS DOS only gives 95kb UMB; maybe I need to include some region on emm386 line.

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1) Please include All bugs in DR-DOS that are not in MS-DOS from Intel TESTMEM test suite Boundary test:

Allocating more (expanded memory) pages than available in system EMM did not return the expected results (returned 12 instead of 9A).

DTK 386 cold boot/hang problem:

After installing DR 6 on this machine, cold boot always results in a "Cannot load file". Press a key to retry." When press a key, the machine will boot fine. Warm boot always work without this problem.

Also there's intermittent hang after exiting EDITOR. It hung on me twice today. Haven't seen these problems happen on another machine.

Warm boot with HIDOS.SYS installed gives "Warning: Address line A20 already enabled."

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2) Anything you did not like about DR-DOS

DR DOS reports version as 3.31; no lie table and programs won't run.

Their EDITOR looks antique (compared to ours); haven't used WORDSTAR for ages.

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3) Anything you like about DR-DOS that we should add to future MS-DOS versions

DR MEM program output looks sharp: layout is clearer and offers more info than ours.

DOSBOOK online help looks pretty fancy and helpful.

DR SETUP lets user tune system after installation. This concept is good but their implementation is not useful enough.

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http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/px00963.pdf

From brade Fri Sep 20 17:31:57 1991 To: bradsi Cc: bradc; braddir; dosmktg; lizsi; w-carrin; w-maria Subject: PC Week and DR DOS Date: Fri Sep 20 17:32:48 PDT 1991

Carrine's great work got us the oppurtunity to feed pc week some info on where to look for bugs with dr dos. I have had a couple of conversations with lenny bailes who is helping with the ms-dos 5 versus dr-dos 5 evaluation process.

Today tom and i talked to him. on the negative side i probably brought up one two many things for him to look at. it is difficult to appropriately and professionally try and trash your competitor. also on the negative side, lenny clearly seems to be a dr dos fan. to be fair i think he is sincere and is trying to be balanced.

also on the negative side he did tells us that under 1 meg dr dos 6 was better than ms-dos 5 on 7 out of 10 machines they tested. no real details but i think the differences will be small.

on the positive side they did themselves find some of the setup problems (such as poor updating to config.sys) and he has passed on tp the pc weeks labs some of these configurations we suggested they look at that we uncovered with dr dos 5. he was also intrigued by some of the data from yesterday's dr-dos 6 test, in particular tom's problems when he entered a ton of nested directory names.

http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/px00964.pdf

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