I have an early IBM PC, with dual-floppy 5-1/4" diskette drives and would like to display it at work. It will boot to BASIC just fine but would like one of the original IBM PC-DOS diskettes to boot to DOS. I checked EBay but didn't see anything there. Does anyone know where I might find one of these?

There's no earthly reason to use DOS1 - - 3.2 was the first version that functioned well - - your chief difficulty would likely be how to create the actual diskette

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something."

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Have a look (if you're that determined)

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something."

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Your first problem is gonna be determining what capacity the floppy drives are--and getting, or making, a set of floppies to match the drive.

If that thing has a serial port, you might want to consider learning how to use a file transfer syste---something like the excellant old Laplink3 (ll3.exe), or XTreeGold's "xtlink"

or gasp, Microsoft interlink/interserver,

You MAY be able to temporarily rob one of the floppies out of the old unit, stick in one of your newer machines in order to "build" floppies, but, again, you'll have to determine their capacity.

Heck for all I know, they might be 180kb drives.

Also, if that thing is that old (8088?) it undoubtedly won't have an "onboard" bios program, which means you'll need to scare up a floppy to adjust the bios--if you make any changes.

Incidently, and unrelated, I once had a proprietary card (which started MANY agruements) this card had it's own build in bios, and allowd hi density drives to be installed in older machines.

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Try contacting X86 he uses MS-DOS...

Original PC's had hardware setup by dip switches.

This thread seems to have gone far deeper than it should.

These early pc's sometimes came with just one fdd that worked, although with far smaller programs than we have today.

Jason is asking for a bootable 5.25" floppy. Can anyone provide this?

Jason - can you advise the maximum capacity of the floppy disc that can be read by drive A: as various drives were used in those days.
(suggest you test to prove)
e.g.
If 180kb drive is SS DD
360 DS DD
1200 DS HD

A 3.5" drive could be installed by using a driver, although it had to be B: and probably only DD.

Also if a hdd is required, it was necessary to add a controller card or sometimess a hdd card (remember those?).

Jason - how do you intend recieving a bootable floppy if someone has one to send?
Also check out www.bootdisk.com

Jboy is right in advising v3.x is better. Which is more likely to be available.

Good Luck - Keep us posted.

As previously mentioned, a more recent version of DOS is preferable. As long as it is supplied on the proper density floppy, I believe you can boot up to version 6.x.

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..was using 8086 Amstrads...........

Wizard-fred, you are correct in that you can boot just about any version of dos.

However with pc's (especially floppy only versions) all programs, including dos, were much smaller - they had to be.

e.g.:-
a) the o/s would fit on one floppy
b)the application would fit on another
c)user data for (b) on another.

This minimised disk changes.

I think running a floppy only version of 6.x would be somewhat of a nightmare. After all, it is delivered on 3 HD disks. Whereas version 2 and maybe 3 came on 1 disk.

Good Luck - Keep us posted.

Mike: I remember configuring swappable floppies to make it work. For 123v1A and WP 4.1. I mention 6.x because I have a PC clone now upgraded to PC/XT clone, that used 360K floppies. 5 original DOS files (io.sys, msdos.sys, command.com, attrib.com, doskey.com), config.sys, autoexec.bat, Buerg's List, Text Editor (PE from WP Libary). About 70K free.

You are right. 3 1.44 3.5 HD floppies or 4 1.2 5.25 HD floppies for the whole install.

The original poster mentioned boot only.

It's usefullness as a period piece would be enhanced by all original hardware and software. I imagine that's why he's looking for 1.0.

I just tossed out some early dos stuff. The manuals for those early versions were small loose-leaf notebooks with the disks in plastic sleeves in the back. Check at goodwill or other thrift stores. I'll let you know if I come across any.

This sounds like an 'original' PC model, prior to the XT - - no hard drive at all, likely with full height, 360K floppy drives - - just about any DOS will work, but unless the poster can buy the diskette outright, they would have to be able to create the boot disk from the appropriate image file (if available)

I can't imagine using an form of DOS1.x - - I've used v2.12 and it was about as intuitive as a C-64 (maybe not even)

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something."

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DOS versions 1.0 and 1.1 are rare - you'll be very lucky to find them on original disks (check that link jboy posted where there's a copy selling for $1550!). They are also very primitive (didn't support directories, hard disks or double-density floppies) - really they are only of historical interest.

DOS 1.x came on 160K disks (that's single sided, single density, 8 sectors/track). Transferring DOS 1.x from/to a disk image file is difficult because their boot sectors lack certain markers which DOS 2.x and all newer operating systems look for, so any modern computer will see the disks as unformatted or corrupted. 'Starman' describes this problem in detail here:

http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/DOS/ibm110/Boot.htm

If you can work around this problem, then physically writing the disk should be easy enough; just move one of those 5-1/4" drives into a newer PC. I'm fairly sure floppy drives are one of the few bits of the PC that hasn't changed, so they will probably work even in a PC made today. (But remember to change the BIOS settings to indicate it's there - these will certainly be single-density (360K) drives)

OmniDisk, OmniFlop and WinImage are programs that might be useful.