Lab - Windows NT

At first, on a Windows NT lab environment one doesn't seem to need an initial VDM (virtual DOS machine) as carefully configured as in DOS. But in pure DOS I was able to get even more free conventional memory, about 615 KB. And by using XCOBOL under DOS one doesn't really need Windows NT at all, as long as the required 512 KB of EMS and presumably some XMS as well could be set aside as shown on a previous post. Hence, so far, I don't see any advantage on using Windows NT for conducting builds, since using a DOS with RAM drives are blindly fast for the whole workflow and you can have many of them side by side and better isolated than in Windows NT.

The example below considers a Virtual PC environment.

XCOBOL 5.0 running on Windows NT

To successfully invoke the compiler consider the following:

A sample CONFIG.NT:
 

DOS=high,umb
DEVICE=%SystemRoot%\system32\himem.sys

FILES=100
SHELL=%SystemRoot%\system32\command.com /E:4096

A sample AUTOEXEC.NT: 

LH %SystemRoot%\system32\redir
LH %SystemRoot%\system32\dosx

... insert the COBOL environment variables here ...