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a temporary DOS prevention mechanism

The blockchain is over 40 Gbytes. That prevents running a node on DOS. I don't think any other mechanisms are needed.

Well, actually, there is more than one type of DOS. DR-DOS for instance, with the (7.01.04) update, can access drives larger than 7.8 Gigs.

A reference would be much appreciated, or else I'll have to assume that you had buggy software or h/w, or that you don't remember correctly, or...making things up.

Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2pBdoo2TgI

From http://drdosprojects.de/forum/drp_forum/posts/8863.html

All 7.0x versions of DR-DOS can run Windows up to Windows for
Workgroups 3.11; this includes Enhanced DR-DOS. I don't know about
v8.0, but DR-DOS 8.1 should be able to run it, too, since it uses
the v7.01.06 kernel.

This just makes me miss DR-DOS...

Why?

Proprietary DR-DOS version
Open Source DR-DOS/OpenDOS version

Novell was a very proprietary company which improved their products v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y ('80s through mid '90s) so SCO a group of engineers and execs left Novell and begat Caldera. Caldera bought DR-DOS after the Windows incompatibility fiasco (deliberate sabotage by Microsoft), declared that "OSes want to be free" and opened up their DOS source for all to see. Caldera begat Free DOS, and it was good.

Caldera acquired "Novell DOS", after Novell bought Digital Research (and thus DR-DOS). Caldera begat OpenDOS. Pat Villani begat http://www.freedos.org/. Two separate implementations of a Microsoft DOS compatible operating system. And Caldera only opened up some of their DOS code (the kernel, basic drivers and command-line interpreter, if I recall correctly... I'd have to dig out my OpenDOS disc to be 100% certain).

Caldera looked upon the Free DOS and their gaining a decent following, and declared that open source looked promising, so they introduced a Linux distribution that was a bit ahead of its time. They looked upon their package management and update download-equipped open-source Linux operating system and saw that it was good.

In truth, Caldera hopped on the open source bandwagon, made great promises of giving the OS community a time-tested implementation of MS-DOS, then quietly faded into obscurity after releasing a little bit of code. I have their Linux distribution on disc somewhere here, too, but it didn't catch my eye well enough to make me want to switch from Slackware, so I don't really remember it as being anything special.

What Wikipedia says about DR-DOS : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS.
Turns out someone's still working on it, as well : http://www.drdosprojects.de/
And finally, Wikipedia's entry on FreeDOS : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedos.

DOS is one of several operating systems that I have installed and can boot-up into on my AMD Athlon 64 3800+ computer. I actually have PC-DOS 2000 (instead of FreeDOS) installed on the first partition of my first harddrive, it is a FAT-16 partition. When booting up, a menu appears that allows me to choose whether to boot up into Windows 2000, PC-DOS 2000. or one of several different versions of Linux. PC-DOS 2000 was a minor Y2K upgrade of the Last version of DOS that IBM had released. As you may recall, Microsoft and IBM each had their own versions of DOS since back in the 1980's Surprisingly, my AMD Athlon 64 can run more than just 64-bit software. I don't recall if DOS is 16-bit software or what, but it runs just fine on my AMD Athon 64.

The obvious question is why would anyone want to run DOS on a modern computer? Well, I have fond memories of tinkering with batch files, DOS commands and old DOS games back in the late 1980's and early 1990s. Every once in a while, I like to re-experience the retro experience of what it was like to run DOS. I do not boot-up into DOS very often, but I am glad that I can choose to boot up into DOS once in a while when I want to. Of course Linux, Windows or almost any other modern OS is actually better on a modern desktop computer for everyday use.

I actually have a mixture of Free-DOS and PC-DOS 2000 installed on the fat-16 partition. If I remember correctly, I did that by installing FreeDOS first and then later installing PC-DOS 2000 on top of it. Afterwards, I then manually edited the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to remove any wierdness that resulted from istalling both that way. I had a slight preference for the PC-DOS 2000 but doing it that way gave me all the extra free software and some Linux/Unix like commands that come with the FreeDOS. Am I the only one out there who occasionally boots his AMD Athlon 64 3800+ up into DOS?

There are actually several choices for running old DOS programs. One choice is Free-DOS. Another choice is DR-DOS/OpenDOS which, if I understand correctly, is a commercial product in which the source code of the kernel has been under an Open Source license. Another alternative is to run the free DOSBox emulator under Windows or Linux. Using DOSBox I have been able to run old DOS games such as "Commader Keen" under Linux and even managed to get my USB joystick and modern soundcard to work with it. Yet another option is to use VMWare to create a virtual machine for FreeDOS and run it in a virtual machine under either Linux or Windows. Even though their are other alternatives, I am glad to see that the FreeDOS project is still alive and about to release version 1.0.

MS-DOS 1.0 did not exist, it was IBM Personal Computer DOS 1.0 instead. IIRC the first MS-DOS was 2.0 when it was renamed. IBM PC-DOS and MS-DOS were based on 86-DOS/Q-DOS which was a CP/M-86 rip-off with some modifications. DRI, maker of CP/M, released DR-DOS which was almost the same thing as MS-DOS, and after being bought out many times, eventually OpenDOS 7.01 was released with source code. So there is your source code to PC-DOS/MS-DOS right there, technically, because it is almost the same thing. :)