On 4/13/2021 11:39 AM, Michael Christopher Robinson wrote:
I am fully aware that BIOS used to be updated in MS-DOS. I am 41
years old, older than some people who seem to be experts on this and
probably older than Liam.
Well, Michael, I have still another 20 years on you (and working with
computers for 45 years in late May/early June) and one general advice I
would give you is to at least try to properly format what you write. It
might make it so much easier to try and following what you are trying to
say...
Stefano, did you ever successfully update your bios? Reality is,
Windows 95 dos and Windows 98SE DOS is not really dos per se and
Windows ME DOS is definitely a weird hybrid that is way different from
all previous versions of MS-DOS that Microsoft created. DELL probably
recommends using a version of Windows to update the bios that is an NT
based Windows. I agree that using Windows NT to update BIOS or even
Firmware is foolishness. Windows NT is a very complex OS where all we
are talking about when we are updating BIOS or Firmware is something
that should not require graphics let alone the NT kernel.
Utter nonsense. Specially Dell's Windows BIOS update tool just works
like a charm, I have personally used it on hundreds of clients PC in the
last 15 years or so. Just had one case where it didn't work, and that
was because of a bad BIOS flash ROM chip, which was the reason for a
last ditch effort to try and fix an apparently corrupt BIOS.
Sounds to me like Stefano's DELL is not solidly ancient and not
adequately modern. It is close to being completely MS-DOS compatible
and not quite modern either where you would want to run bloated
Windows NT on it. By abandoning MS-DOS, Microsoft made updating your
BIOS and later your firmware ridiculously painful. Microsoft could
have open sourced MS-DOS 4.0, they never have.
Why would they? MS-DOS 4.0 was released in 1988 (you were apparently 8
at that time and might not properly remember) and it (and subsequent
versions up to 6.22, which was released in 1994) was a viable commercial
product for them and they stopped support for it in 2002. Beside, it
would not have been only MS decision at this point to "open source" or
whatever, as significant portions for it by that time where written and
copyrighted by Compaq (large disk support) and of course IBM...
...
The Raspberry Pi which is sadly a proprietary hardware platform, does
nut support DOS. I thought it did by some miracle. It doesn't.
Utter nonsense. The Raspberry Pi is a rather open hardware platform. And
of course it doesn't support natively, as it is not powered by an x86
CPU, it's using various iterations of an ARM RISC CPU.
Apparently, nobody has released a hypervisor for the Raspberry Pi 4
that will emulate an 80386 or earlier well enough to run FreeDOS or
any DOS without issues.
Again, rather uninformed nonsense. DOSBox, specially in the form of
DOSBIAN, runs an emulated x86/DOS environment just fine...
Ralf
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