The machine below is an IBM PC XT (Model 5160) with a 4.77Mhz 8088, 640K of memory, a Monochrome Display, two diskette drives, and a 10Mb hard disk. It boots the BASIC-DOS 640K Monochrome Demo diskette and runs a single 80-column session, which starts on drive C:, the hard disk, with the BASIC-DOS source code, tests, and tools. Since the machine has a hard disk, the boot sector first displays Press a key to start...; press any key (or wait 2 seconds) to boot from the diskette, or press Esc to boot from the hard disk instead. The PC XT has no clock to keep the date and time, so this page types DATE and TIME commands with the current date and time at the first prompt.
Unlike the 64K version of this demo, there’s room for all of COMMAND.COM and the FPU$ driver, so floating-point, the sound and file statements, and LOAD’s support for tokenized BAS files (like the originals on the PC DOS 1.00 diskette in drive B:) are all available; the graphics statements are too, but without a graphics adapter, they report Illegal function call. To build BASIC-DOS, type CD \SRC and then MK to rebuild whatever has changed, or MK FINAL CLEAN to rebuild everything.
Any changes you make to the hard disk are lost when you leave the page, unless you first click Save HD to download the hard disk as an IMG file.
This demo is also available on an IBM PC with 64K and no hard disk.
The hard disk’s SAMPLES directory contains text copies of the BASIC samples from the IBM PC DOS 1.00 diskette, but most of them use graphics, so try the Color Graphics machine demo instead.
REM 640K demonstration with one session, with its shell on the hard disk
BUFFERS=8
SHELL=C:COMMAND.COM PATH$="C:\;C:\EXT;C:\DEMOS;C:\SAMPLES;C:\TESTS;C:\TOOLS"
Copyright (c) 2020-2026 Jeff Parsons Released under MIT License