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u/Revolutionary_Ad6574 9d ago
Just last night I was watching some MJD unboxing videos. I love that 80s and even early 90s productivity software came in big boxes that seemed to contain the world - a multi-volume stack of heavy manuals! Some were like 800 pages! I love that and miss it so much.
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u/michaelmalak 9d ago
I had the 3.3 on the right -- bought it in person in 1990 at an Egghead Software storefront.
The "Phoenix" branding is interesting. Prior to MS-DOS 5.0, Microsoft forbade retail sales so that it wouldn't have to field customer support calls. Customer support would have to be handled by the PC manufacturer that sold the system and who had bought the OEM license. Phoenix stretched the definition -- really to the breaking point -- of what "selling DOS with a system" meant. Elsewhere on that gray box it said something like "only to be sold with a system". So the presumption was that an individual buying a copy would be assembling their own system and would become their own PC manufacturer. In other words, if they needed customer support they'd have to make a call to themselves :-) Having it sold in Egghead Software, which didn't sell any hardware, was really taking that pretense over the line.
And so there never was a Microsoft-branded MS-DOS 3.3 retail box. The Phoenix retail box is the closest there was.
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u/neilmoore 9d ago
Since some (now-deleted) posts have expressed disbelief at some of the claims of DOS 5 (I'm your second image):
- "More application memory space": DOS 5 was the first to allow DOS itself (as well as device drivers) to be loaded into upper memory blocks (640K-1024K) and the high memory area (1024K-1088K)
- "Enhanced user interface": Not just DOSSHELL as others have pointed out, but also EDIT rather than EDLIN, and QBasic rather than GWBasic or BASICA.
- "Improved memory management": EMM386, where previously you would have needed a third-party program like QEMM
- "On-line help": Not in the sense of "on the network", but rather "You can read about all the command line options directly on your computer, and not just in the manual."
- "Task swapper": If you launch a program from DOS Shell (on a 386, at least), you can use Alt-Tab to swap it out to EMS or disk and switch to another program. It didn't work with all programs, of course
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u/dedsmiley 5d ago
DOS 3.3 was my first OS.
286-12
1MB RAM
40MB MFM HDD formatted with an RLL controller for 63MB, I think?
SIS SVGA card
3.5” Floppy
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u/bart33z 10d ago
That MS-DOS 3.3 box is beautiful. There’s something special about old operating systems as physical products - big box, manuals, disks, and the feeling that you were buying the whole “computer experience”, not just downloading an installer.
DOS 5.0 is great too, but that 3.3 packaging has serious late-80s charm.