How to make a virtual DOS machine with networking

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/.

This nondescript floppy contains PC-DOS 1.0, the earliest released version of Microsoft's MS-DOS.
Networking with DOS has come a long, long way since these days.

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.

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