Say "640k", and it strikes fear into even the most manliest of men, because in the way MS-DOS memory management works, you are more or less guaranteed to run out of conventional memory, a.k.a. base memory.

If you ever wondered why you don’t see more videos on YouTube or like video sharing sites that show retro PCs with MS-DOS using the internet, the reason is because it’s a nightmare getting the TCP/IP stack to load, work, acquire an IP and then have enough memory left to launch an MS-DOS browser like Arachne.

"Memmaker!", you may say. Oh, you poor fool. That MS-DOS utility will not solve your problems and in fact make them worse. What was a relatively easy-to-understand AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS has now turned into a nightmare of what memmaker thought was correct.

You can have 64MB RAM (which I believe is the maximum supported by MS-DOS), LOADHIGH and UMB all day long, but you’re not gonna get that TCP/IP stack to work and will end up wondering why you didn’t take up rocket science instead. And even if you are a rocket scientist, you’re still not getting that TCP/IP stack to load without running out of memory on boot of DOS.

Incidentally, Bill Gates did not say that 640k is enough for anyone. That’s a computer urban legend that’s been quashed for years.

Was 640k ever enough?

For a time it was. On the personal computing front, 640k in the home was enough to run just about anything you wanted. You could run your WordPerfect or DeskMate with ease, run a few simple games and so on.

The only time you needed more than 640k in the DOS environment was either for games or running a BBS. The tradition of games needing way more than people could afford for a computer did start with DOS. As for BBSes, you could run a very simple single-node system with 640k, but if you tried running anything like door games, a multi-node system using 2 or more phone lines and/or a front end mailer, yeah you needed additional RAM for that.

Windows is what ultimately led to people actually needing more RAM. Even with the Windows environment using swap space (which you know as virtual memory), there was still the need for more RAM to run a graphical multi-tasking environment.

Touching back on using the internet with MS-DOS, as crazy as this sounds you’re actually better off "feeding" in a terminal connection via serial cable rather than try to directly use the TCP/IP stack under DOS itself via your trusty old 3Com Etherlink III. Serial connections require next to nothing for memory use. You could even use a BBS dialer program to connect direct over serial to the server (most likely a Linux box acting as a console server) providing the gateway out to the internet.

Nobody – and I mean nobody – misses how memory in MS-DOS used to work. Yeah, DOS is cool and all that, but working with its memory management is just plain painful.

On a final note, for those of you who want to get your DOS on and relive the bad old days, there is FreeDOS. And yes that does mean it’s free. FreeDOS runs the same way MS-DOS did, and has the same system requirements, meaning you can install it on that clunky old 286 you have kicking around in the basement..

..assuming you have floppies ready to copy FreeDOS to for install. Yeah, I didn’t think you had any 5.25-inch blank diskettes handy. And even if you do, how are you going to hook that beast of a floppy drive to your Windows 7 computer box? It’s not like your motherboard has a port for that 5.25-inch drive. Bummer.

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