We had some nice KC-DBA (expertise meetings) meetings in 2005. One of them was about virtual machines (VMware basically). To show how you could use virtual machine technology to implement an environment which would be almost undoable nowadays to realize, a virtual machine environment was demonstrated with Oracle 4.1 installed based on DOS. Thanks to Carel Jan Engel (one the infamous OAKTable guys) – i was able to build a default Oracle 4.1 database environment with all the goodies like the UFI (the user friendly interface).
The old DOS disks where recovered from some boxes on my attic, so with some extra effort, the installation wasn’t so difficult (i still remembered how to do the ansi.sys, autoexec.bat and config.sys upper and lower memory stuff ) All in all it was good fun. 🙂
Strange enough you need(ed) the first oracle floppy in the floppy disk to start the database. I can not remember this from my Oracle 6 days.