Booting Up the June, 1981 Pre-Release Copy
of IBM® Personal Computer™ DOS 1.00

All Photos Copyright©2019 by Daniel B. Sedory
NOT to be reproduced in any form without Permission of the Author !

 


The IBM DOS “June, 1981” Boot Screens
and the PC We Used:

NOTE: Some pictures are CLICKable to see larger size!

 

 

After the disk boots, it executes an AUTOEXEC.BAT file which runs DATE.COM, then MOVBAS.COM and BAS18A.COM.

Note that the range of dates for early IBM PC DOS; apart from the strange "00-00-80" you see here on the second line, were only from 01-01-80 through 12-31-99. Entering anything else would result in an "INVALID" error message.

 

 

After exiting the BASIC program using SYSTEM, a DIR *.COM command was entered:

Note that the latest file date here is 06-04-81 (June 4, 1981); two months before the final release was ready (when all of the release files would have their dates changed to "08-04-81" no matter what their last change date had been).

 

 

Top Drive: 5 - 1/4 inch Diskette Drive which is quite capable of reading 1200 KB (double-sided, high density, 15 Sectors/Track, 80-Sector) diskettes. Yet, backwards compatible for even the original IBM PC DOS 1.00, 160 KB diskette!

Bottom Drive: 3.5-inch Floppy Disk Drive capable of reading the latest (for its time) 1440 KB (double-sided, normal high density, 18 Sectors/Track, 80 Tracks) diskette. But it's still capable of reading a floppy formatted as only a single-sided, 8 SPT, 40-Track, 160 KB diskette!

 

 

View of this PC's Soltek SL-52B2 Motherboard, with a 100 MHz Intel Pentium-S CPU installed. Click on picutre to see details, such as the Award BIOS label on a large 32-pin EPROM chip in a DIP socket; so you could physically replace the BIOS chip.

 

 

Note the orignal-IBM-style KEYBOARD SOCKET at the rear. The SERIAL PORT to the right could be used for a Serial Mouse.

Two of this board's advanced (at the time) PCI slots are filled with a 15-pin Video Card and a Realtek NA2632RS 10/100 Ethernet (LAN) Card.


First Published: 22 JUL 2019 (22.07.2019).


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