Talk to any folk used to program in those early version
to see how many HACKS the 127 character PATH would need then...
I am not sure what you are talking about
I have recently forked DosBox to embed some old DOS commercial compilers into a Linux shell. Why? Well, because I want to pass parameters from the bash to the DOS compiler without any X11 things in the middle, I don't wont to use QEMU, I cannot use Wine on a non-x86 machine, and I also want to pass files in and out during the process.
I have a full x86 CPU emulator running on a PowerPC CPU, I have no VGA card emulation for the DOS stuff DOSBos has it, it has been massively hacked and removed:
- messages sent to VIDEO card are catch on the fly and readdressed to STDERR (it's ugly but it works)
- when DOS invokes FAT primitives, there is a FAT16 wrapper to pass files from/to Linux's shell
I haven't seen so much garbage in it
What's really annoying is the the DOS filename because it's limited to 8 chars plus 3 other chars for the extension -> 8+3 = 11 chars, and since on Linux I am using longer filenames, I am using an blackmagic function to mediate.
Linux's filename input (source file, assembly, C, linker script) -> blackmagic8-3_encode(filename) -> 11 chars -> wrapper_in -> DOSBOX -> compiler -> DOSBOX -> wrapper_out -> blackmagic8-3_decode(filename) -> Linux's filename output (binary and list files)
It works so transparent that you wouldn't feel the difference between invoking gcc/sdcc and an "embedded-DOS-compiler" if I didn't tell you about it