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Plasma Wed Oct 2 2024 at 11:00 am
I see
 
 
The idea behind the clock driver was to standardize access to the RTC, which was not built-in back in the PC/XT days (IBM 5150 and 5160). There were a bunch of aftermarket expansion cards with clocks, such as the AST Six Pack. But there was no hardware standard, so you would usually need to run some included utility to get or set the date/time.

For example: https://www.minuszerodegrees.net/rtc/rtc.htm

The vendor could provide a clock device driver instead, which allows DOS itself to access the RTC. In practice, this was not very common. But you will see a few clock.sys files on the page above.

However, all of this was made obsolete with the introduction of the AT (IBM 5170) and compatibles. These systems all have a built-in RTC with standard BIOS interface. So there is no longer a need for any special utilities or third-party clock drivers.
 
 
 
 

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