DOS’s last Stand on a modern Thinkpad: X13 Gen 1 with Intel i5-10310U

When one thinks of modern technologies like Thunderbolt, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and modern CPUs, one would associate them with modern operating systems. How about DOS?

It might seem impossible, however I did an experiment on a relatively modern 2020 Thinkpad and found that it can still run MS-DOS 6.22. MS-DOS 6.22 is the last standalone version of DOS released by Microsoft in June 1994. This makes it 30 years old today.

I shall share the steps and challenges in locating a modern laptop capable of doing so and making the 30-year-old OS work on it with audio and networking functions. This is likely among the final generation of laptops able to run DOS natively.
↫ Yeo Kheng Meng

I was unaware that the legacy boot mode through a UEFI Compatibility Support Module (CSM) was being phased out on Intel systems (I can’t find anything definitive on what AMD is planning to do with CSM). This will definitely be an end-of-the-line kind of thing for people interested in running old, outdated operating systems on modern hardware, as doing so would require proper EFI support. I’m not actually salty about this at all by the way – there’s no place in modern PCs for something designed in 1981.

We have ATX for that.

Anyway, it turns out MS-DOS 6.22 actually runs pretty well on this 2020 Thinkpad X13 Gen 1. Of course you have to enable CSM, and disable secure boot and kernel DMA proection, but once that’s done, you can just install MS-DOS 6.22 like it’s 1994. Thanks to SBEMU, you can use modern sound cards in pure DOS mode, and due to various backwards compatibility affordances in network chipsets, you can even use some of those – even through Thunderbolt, which is just PCI over a cable, after all (more or less).

Running MS-DOS on a modern laptop may not allow you to get the most out of your modern hardware, but at least you can run DOS games very well, as the benchmarks Meng ran show.