Last Updated on August 21, 2016 by Dave Farquhar
If you want a virtual DOS machine running inside a modern PC operating system, with old-school networking and everything, everything you need to do it is at http://lazybrowndog.net/freedos/virtualbox/.
It includes a DOS client so you can connect to network shares on your host machine (or any other machine on your network) via TCP/IP. Plus you can download files with wget and browse web pages with Arachne.
It takes less space than a real DOS PC, if space is a constraint for you, and it’s an interesting workaround for the disk size problem too. Connect up to a 3 TB drive shared on the network, and DOS won’t care. A vintage PC won’t recognize drives that size connected to it directly–not now, and not a million years from now. So if you have more than 4.3 GB of DOS software you want to run, this is a way to do it.
And it’s a good way to learn Microsoft networking from the command line, if nothing else.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.