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From: rassilon@mit-eddie.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: The many versions of PC/MS-DOS
Message-ID: <4948@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 24-Feb-87 20:16:28 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.4948
Posted: Tue Feb 24 20:16:28 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Feb-87 04:43:08 EST
References: <2415@dalcs.UUCP>
Reply-To: rassilon@eddie.MIT.EDU (Brian Preble)
Distribution: na
Organization: Boston University School of Medicine - OB/GYN Lab
Lines: 32

In article <2415@dalcs.UUCP> lane@dalcs.UUCP (John Wright/Dr. Pat Lane) writes:

>	I am looking for some info on the differences between the various
>	versions of MS-DOS: 2.00, 2.10, 2.11, 2.15(?), 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, ...?
>
>	Relative advantages/dis-advantages, recommendations, etc.  

The major difference between the 3.# series and anything prior is in the way
clusters are allocated on non-floppy storage (hard drives, RAM disks, etc.)
The older versions of MS-DOS allocated to much space, thus causing files to
be written in (for example) 8K chunks on a 20 meg hard drive.  This means
that even though your file may only be 500 bytes it takes 8192 on disk.  The
newer versions (3.0 and later) have fixed this so that on a 20 meg hard
drive the cluster size is only 2K.  This is a considerable savings in space.

Note that the cluster size for floppies is still 1K (though it need only be
256K) to preserve compatibility and maintain some reasonable speed.  (The
smaller the cluster size, the longer it takes to read a file. (I think.))

3.1 corrects some bugs in 3.0, and 3.2 corrects some bugs from 3.1, adds some
new ones, and is necessary if you want to run a ring network.

>	I have heard of an MSDOS or PCDOS ver 5 or something like that (not
>	yet released?).  What's the story on that?

I've heard rumors from various sources that MS-DOS 4.0 was scrapped due to
too many problems.  Version 5 will (supposedly) be multi-tasking.  Does
anyone else have any information on this?

>	Many thanks as always.

				Your welcome,
				   -- Rassilon (rassilon@eddie.mit.edu)