Day: October 12, 2007

Did it. At last I managed to install Oracle V5.1.17.4 on MSDOS 6.22 under VMware Server 1.04. You probably think I am nuts. As someone said on our way home from Miracle Open World: “I would spend my time learning Oracle 11g”. Maybe. The person who said it, by the way, is an Oracle trainer, so what would I expect…

I / we (Bert Jan Meinders, an old colleague of mine) did our first attempt almost 1, 1 1/2 years ago. Our first attempt was based on VMware GSX software after we succesfully installed Oracle 4.1 on MSDOS. This was the first time (and until now the last time) I saw a total crash of VMware software. Oracle V5 was shipped under DOS with a memory manager called SQLPME (SQL Protected Mode Executive) V1.2.1.

This memory manager made extended memory available for use of Oracle software (database, forms etc), this way it could cross the 640 Kb boundary of conventional memory.

SQLPME was aggressive enough with its peeking and poking in memory that it crashed the VMware GSX environment at the time. Under VMware Server 1.04 it just hung itself up / nothing happened.

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