What's the exact size and date of the file?

362.496kb, 28/9/92

Sent a PM.

Problem solved thanks to konc!

Wow, what an excellent condition! Really nice!

Don't you just hate that!
Found a copy of Office 4.3 in a server room (last version to support Win 3.x) course only 1 disk out of the whole set was bad.
In a way I was lucky and "found" a copy on the net. but it just doesn't feel quite "complete"

I don't know why I have such an obsession with the system requirements sticker on DOS game boxes, but I immediately gravitated to that on your pics, badmojo. I sometimes go to ebay and search for big box games just to read the sticker. 🤣.

chinny22 wrote:

but it just doesn't feel quite "complete"

Sometimes I feel the same.

clueless1 wrote:

but I immediately gravitated to that on your pics, badmojo

Me, too. 😀 By the way, talking about system requirements, the oldest software I have is MS-DOS 3.21. Unfortunately, the box isn't in a nice condition.

But the disks and documents are in excellent shape. I take good care of them!

Back then, the system requirements were quite simple. 😁

Ha yeah my eyes head directly for the system requirements too! It was such an important factor back in the day, and generally speaking I was on the wrong side of the cut off for most of my childhood so that sticker could make or break you. Not that they were 100% truthful with those anyway, particularly once SVGA entered the mix.

I'm kind of mystified as to why they'd release SoD in 1992 on low-density disks (the 5.25" and 3.5" releases were 360K and 720K respectively), especially since hi-density drives were standard by then. Unless you had an XT-class machine, which wouldn't run SoD in the first place.

But that's nowhere near as mystifying as the that MS-DOS 3.21 box "art". I can only assume that the designer was trying to get fired, and it somehow flew right over the product manager's head. 😁

Maybe I'm missing the obvious, but what's mystifying about the DOS 3.21 box?

VileRancour wrote:

I'm kind of mystified as to why they'd release SoD in 1992 on low-density disks (the 5.25" and 3.5" releases were 360K and 720K respectively), especially since hi-density drives were standard by then -

A warehouse full of empty double-density disks that otherwise would have to be thrown away? (Excuse my annoyance with the "low density" part; it's just a pet peeve of mine. 😀)

NewRisingSun wrote:

Maybe I'm missing the obvious, but what's mystifying about the DOS 3.21 box?

Mostly the thought process behind choosing that most unattractive of things, a screenshot of DIR, for the "art" (and contriving it to show an arbitrary selection of files... whose real number is then hidden by that gray bar, no doubt to tease and tantalize the buyer). A blank/solid color design would've looked better, or at least not as slapdash.

VileRancour wrote:

(Excuse my annoyance with the "low density" part; it's just a pet peeve of mine. 😀)

True, I stand corrected. 😀

I think there actually was a fad in the 1980s among some marketing people towards "brutal honesty" in box art: when Nintendo released the NES, their marketing agency told them to replace the drawn box art of the Japanese game versions with ugly pixelized images. That was based on the questionable belief that the videogame market had died earlier in the decade because people were supposedly disappointed that the Atari 2600 graphics looked nothing like the box art or something.

At least they didn't use the CGA output to make that DIR screenshot 😉

The Nintendo game calendars back then were also a similar deal. Large printed colorful pixelated artwork with slightly more uneven aliased pixel definition than the originals 😀 almost like "modern" "oldschool" "retro" "vintage" videogame pixel art these days

VileRancour wrote:

I'm kind of mystified as to why they'd release SoD in 1992 on low-density disks (the 5.25" and 3.5" releases were 360K and 720K respectively), especially since hi-density drives were standard by then. Unless you had an XT-class machine, which wouldn't run SoD in the first place.

One thing that comes to mind is that it supports the "IBM PC AT", which originally came with PC-DOS 3.0 (and both MS-DOS & PC-DOS didn't have support for the 1.44MB drives until version 3.3)
Although this might explain the DD disks for the 3.5" release, support for the HD 5 1/4 drives was there in version 3.0 though.

NewRisingSun wrote:

Maybe I'm missing the obvious, but what's mystifying about the DOS 3.21 box?

If you look carefully the upper part, you can see the logo of Apple Inc., which was quite unusal back then! I can't believe you didn't see that!

All I see is that you have removed the image.