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Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Christopher Harper

Newly open-sourced MS-DOS 4 installed on an IBM Personal System/2 with a 16 MHz Intel 386 CPU — took 70 minutes to build

Photo of an IBM PS/2, mid-MS-DOS 4 install.

Following last week's open sourcing of MS-DOS 4 and critique, Twitter user VirtuallyFun shared their cutting-edge 16 MHz Intel i386 MS-DOS 4 install on the 1987 IBM Personal System/2, which mainly lives on today in its legacy PS/2 peripheral connectors. In its time, the IBM PS/2 could also have been paired with IBM's PC DOS or Microsoft-collab Operating System/2.

This MS-DOS 4 install wasn't done with the main Microsoft GitHub repo but instead VirtuallyFun's own dos400 branch. Dos400 forces the 4.0 version of MS-DOS and patches out issues like a bug in msload.asm that prevented booting from the hard drive. This bug was diagnosed by Michal Necasek, who readers of the previous story will recognize as the owner of OS/2 Museum and noted critic of the initial MS-DOS 4 release.

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