Matters Arising From DOS Internals

I, Geoff Chappell, wrote the book DOS Internals (ISBN 0-201-60835-9) from late 1991 to early 1993, with some further work in late 1993 before its publication in early 1994 by Addison-Wesley as a member of the Andrew Schulman Programming Series.

This directory has become the sole repository for corrections and updates. These have turned out to be limited just to keeping the program code working, whether to correct coding errors or to support later DOS versions. Even this had been stopped in 1996, such that support was frozen at DOS 7.00 despite revising for the old website in 1997 and again in 1999. There has never been any attempt to update the program code to benefit from new versions of Microsoft’s 16-bit compiler. There has never been any attempt to update descriptions to account for new DOS versions.

I have not worked with MS-DOS for many years. Though I do receive the occasional query, I am less surprised than astonished. Though I am grateful for the interest, which almost always comes with kind words which the quality of that book does not merit, please understand that I very likely can do nothing to help you.

That said, I do of course mean what I say about this site: “if you discover a mistake and report it to me, then I shall respond at least as well as (and I hope much better than) any reputable software house would respond to news of a defect in a commercial product.” So, if you find that information in DOS Internals is incorrect or unclear about the DOS versions covered, i.e., before Windows 95, or if you find program code that does not work, even with a later DOS version, do please tell me about it. I will do what I can, though I am not set up even to reproduce and observe. It is at least five years since I last had any version of DOS installed on the hard disk of any computer, nor any version of the Windows operating system that starts from DOS. The time is fast approaching when I shall have to draw a line under DOS Internals as unsupported.