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CONFIG.SYS Example
The MS-DOS era from 1989 to 1993 involved “perfecting the CONFIG.SYS.” Being that this was all “pre-internet-in-every-home” I really don’t recall how we all figured out the magic combination of settings that made things work. It was probably a combination of BBS’s and BYTE/PC Magazine articles, and just raw trial and error. Or in the games we played, they came with elaborate manuals with details on how to configure the CONFIG.SYS (at least as appropriate to their situation).
There is no singular “perfect” CONFIG.SYS, because it varied depending on what software or peripherals you were trying to use. But this turmoil did lead to more formally defining the concept of Device Drivers and more dynamically loading the software that was needed, and more organically allocating hardware resources to support the software needs. It was painful, but the desire and need to maintain backwards compatibility at all times was very compelling. Step by step the PC industry did make it towards that goal of a reliable Plug and Play experience.
For reference, here is a singular “non-optimized” example of the CONFIG.SYS I’ve used that enables all the capability described above: SDLPT, BACKPACK, EMM386. Note I am not loading the SBPro CM drivers. Use “MEM /C” to list a broad summary of memory usage (notice how the CD-ROM support uses a relatively huge amount of memory, some of it can be LOADHIGH into upper memory rather than eating conventional RAM).
[TBD – text version of this config.sys and autoexec.bat ]
