Four years ago we pondered why on Earth a DOS floppy boot sector might start with 69h, supposedly a “direct jump” opcode. Which is the IMUL instruction on 80186 and later, and not documented on 8086. In the meantime, it turned out that one of the basic assumptions was invalid: The boot sector does not have to begin with executable code, and in fact need not contain any executable code at all.
This goes back to a distinction which used to be important but over time got all but forgotten: There is a difference between a “DOS compatible” and an “IBM compatible” (or PC compatible) machine. DOS-compatible systems are a superset of IBM-compatible ones. In the early to mid-1980s, there was a fairly large class of 8086/8088 machines which used DOS (and therefore, FAT-formatted floppies) but were not PC compatible. In fact DOS-compatible machines came first, in the form of SCP’s S-100 bus systems running MS-DOS, née 86-DOS, predating the original IBM PC.
It was far from obvious in the early 1980s just how dominant the IBM PC and derived designs would become. A number of vendors offered 8086/8088 machines running DOS (often DOS 2.11) but not using IBM-style ROM BIOS and not necessarily using even remotely IBM-compatible hardware and peripherals. Some of the better known examples were the DEC Rainbow 100 (dual-chip Z80/8088), the Apricot PC, or the NEC APC-III.
Most of the DOS-compatible machines quickly gave way to PC-compatible ones, simply because of the immense wealth of software and hardware produced for PCs (and not for the DOS compatibles). One of the notable exceptions was the NEC PC-98 series whose last model was introduced in 2000. NEC’s PC-98 served the Japanese market, to a significant extent insulated from most of the rest of the world until the Windows 9x era. Another Japanese DOS compatible system was Fujitsu’s FM Towns, introduced as late as 1989 and built until 1997.
There was of course yet another, even more distant class of a system, which one might call “FAT compatible”. For example the Atari ST was built around a Motorola 68000 CPU, but its operating system (TOS) used FAT-formatted floppies.
What does this have to do with DOS boot sectors? A lot. All these systems used FAT-formatted floppies, either optionally or exclusively. They also showed that the FAT filesystem is reasonably flexible. Around 1981, SCP used 8″ single-and double-sided FAT floppies with 128-byte and 1024-byte sectors. Apricot used single-sided 3½″ floppies with 512-byte sectors and 70 tracks. FM Towns used 3½″ floppies with 1024-byte sectors. There were lots of possibilities. Continue reading →
