CD drivers did exist for DOS and you could absolutely boot up a system with one or two floppies, and one optical drive. MSCDEX.EXE was apparently what allowed you to connect to the optical drive.
I never did it - by the time I had an optical drive, I had hard drives - but I kinda wish I had such a system. So wild to have like 500 times the data on a CD (much less DVD) than the floppied you booted from! lol.
Imagine the chaos if you could write to multi-writable CDs, too. lol. THat would have been wild.
A CD drive but no hard disk?
I don’t know of a DOS/Windows that would accept such a thing.edit: nonsense
CD drivers did exist for DOS and you could absolutely boot up a system with one or two floppies, and one optical drive. MSCDEX.EXE was apparently what allowed you to connect to the optical drive.
You’re totally right. You could put DOS on one floppy and the driver on the other or just load it into RAM.
https://archive.org/details/dos-with-cd-rom-support
I never did it - by the time I had an optical drive, I had hard drives - but I kinda wish I had such a system. So wild to have like 500 times the data on a CD (much less DVD) than the floppied you booted from! lol.
Imagine the chaos if you could write to multi-writable CDs, too. lol. THat would have been wild.