Caldera DR-DOS 7.03

Caldera’s DR-DOS 7.03 gives a user-friendly, fast, and
fully DOS-compatible environment for thin-clients and embedded systems. Easy to install
and configure, this Year 2000-compliant OS will correct the system date, even if your BIOS
doesn’t support the Year 2000 date format. Added to this is full support for NetWare
2.x to 4.x, and for using a network copy of Windows installed on a server.

We downloaded the demo copy from www.caldera.com, a 5.95 MB
download. Two versions are available for download: with and without NetWare support. We
tested the first one. The demo copy works for 90 days. After that you can buy it for $39.

Caldera DR-DOS has a lower footprint than any other DOS,
with only 107 kB. This makes it fast, and more suitable for handheld devices and embedded
systems that use ROM chips to boot up. It even includes a personal NetWare server, and a
network game, NetWars 2 built in the standard installation. The final installed size is
quite low–15.6 MB only–inclusive of the Personal NetWare server, games, and
tools.

The memory management part of the OS is optimized to
improve performance on low-end PCs, and NWCACHE (a program included in the distribution)
makes disk access faster.

We ran many standard DOS programs on a DR-DOS installation,
and every program performed better than DOS 6.22 and Win 95/98 DOS-mode. Multimedia apps
and games also showed an improved loading time.

The OS also includes EMM386 mode, and DOS-protected mode
services. Another good feature is multitasking. If your computer has a 386 processor (or
later) with at least 2 MB of extended memory, you can use the Task Manager as a
multi-tasker running multiple tasks simultaneously, and switch between them.
Alternatively, you can use the Task Manager as a task switcher only, in which case you can
switch between apps, but those you switch from are suspended in the background until you
return to them. If your computer is 80286-based with at least 3 MB of memory, you can use
the Task Manager only as a task switcher. You use Shift+Ctrl+Esc to switch between tasks.

Caldera DR-DOS comes with drivers for many network cards.
CD-ROM drives are supported by using NWCDEX and your existing DOS-drivers. The sound
system still uses the standard DOS drivers of your sound card. Disk management and c
ompression tools like Stacker (similar to DRVSPACE), FDISK (much enhanced than standard
DOS FDISK; detects partitions made by Linux and BSD), CHKDSK, and DISKOPTimizer are also
included.

The OS supports Win 95 long file names, and can co-exist
with Win 95 on a system. Its boot loader lets you choose the OS to boot into.

You can also use the Internet and e-mail using PPPShare and
Pegasus Mail for DOS. And if you want Caldera DR-DOS to be a full server and client for
all TCP/IP services, you can go for a Caldera TCP/IP pack that provides support for FTP,
print services, SNMP, Telnet, and for remote devices through standard phone lines.