Could you get an old pc and install dos on it?

Question

I'm curious. I'm not talking about an emulator or anything like that. I mean buying an old pc with a floppy drive, obtaining a fresh product key for Microsoft DOS and installing it the same way my parents did when they got their first PC in the early 90s. I'm just wondering if sourcing this would be impossible or not.

Answer 1

Yes, absolutely.



It does not actually need to be an "old" PC - I have one of my laptops kitted out with multiple hard drive caddies for different operating systems & have one for DOS 6.22 & Windows 3.11 - on a modern SATA-based laptop.



(I had to add a boot manager with IDE emulation for that & other DOS based stuff & Win98 etc.. - Bootit bare metal).



MSDOS did not have any product key and there are many sites you can download floppy images from.

Keys started being used around Win95 or Win98 if I remember correctly??

eg. http://www.thelegacypcproject.com/software.html



Or:

If you get Freedos, it will run as it is on SATA based machines and [most] programs cannot tell it's not MSDOS.

http://www.freedos.org/

Answer 2

While it's technically possible... it's highly unlikely, very impractical & potentially expensive (as it's now considered "vintage" hardware) to do so.



Due to the planned obsolescence, technological advances (in hardware & software) & the typical lifespan on computer hardware... most people don't keep any computer that's over 10 years old (mostly due to personal finance) since new computers can be obtained for as little as $300 (granted specs will be on the bare-bones side, but still functional).



Hardware that's 20+ years old, which I'm calling "Vintage hardware", isn't very power efficient (you could practically run 2-3 modern PC's with the same amount of power a vintage system would use), difficult to debug (as all the major tech support information has been "lost to time") & practically impossible to repair or replace components. I must mention that vintage PC hardware is not user-friendly! If you don't know what you're doing, something is likely going to go wrong & at best will need to call somebody more knowledgable than you to fix it OR at worst, get a brand new-old system (because you FUBAR'ed something).



Due to changing in storage technology, floppies in all formats have been dead for more than a decade as USB "Thumbdrives" & SD cards have replaced them as the portable / travel-friendly storage device that stores multiple gigabytes (thousands of floppies) of data nowadays (around a decade ago, USB storage devices were storing multiple megabytes (or hundreds of floppies) of data) in a more compact form. Optical Discs have been heavily depreciated due to improvements with internet infrastructure (with broadband connections as the norm, verses dial-up 20 years ago) & digital distribution platforms, but are still around as an archival method & for creating personal audio CD's, but is no longer part of the modern standard PC.



If you are willing to face the headaches noted here, go right ahead & proceed. Otherwise, you're better off sticking to DosBox for a similar (albeit, slightly modified via emulation) experience.

Answer 3

Of course, why not?

Answer 4

y not