Dr. DOS Still 'Doing It' At 8.0

An anonymous reader writes "Believe it or not, DOS -- DR-DOS, no less -- is still alive and kicking after all these years! Devicelogics, a company founded by former executives of Caldera and Lineo in Utah, says it has begun shipping version 8.0 of DR-DOS today. The company says the most significant enhancement in the latest version of this long-lived (and 'stable') operating system is support for FAT32 large partitions, enabling DR-DOS 'to keep up with market demand for DOS-based embedded solutions built on FAT32 platforms.'"

Comments

So...

[fm6]

What's the point of linking a story that simply repeats, word for word, the Slashdot story?

And you might have mentioned, for those who think that the only OSs are Windows, Linux, and MacOS, that DR-DOS is the current incarnation of CP/M -- the OS that would have been the OS if the folks at Digital Research hadn't been so paranoid about NDAs.

Re:So...

[Smidge204]

What's the point of linking a story that simply repeats, word for word, the Slashdot story?

You must be new here...

Nobody is expected to actually read the articles. Therefore, the story summary must be detailed enough for people to:

1) Form strong (sometimes overbearing) opinions on the subject
2) Draw "Insightful" conclusions about the scenario, based only on the summary of course
3) Claim to be an expert on the subject
4) Completely refute any arguments in the summary, and declare the whole subject moot
5) Bitch and moan about the summary being too similar or identical to the first paragraph of the linked story

Welcome to /. #8708117!
=Smidge=

Re:No single user license pricing?

[M1FCJ]

If you are single user, FreeDOS makes more sense. More or less the same functionality and free as free beer. If you want text functionality and multi-tasking, Running a small linux kernel (1.2 family kernel for example) would make real sense. The development of those still go on and they fit in a floppy, unlike 2.x kernels which tend to be pretty large. I used to have 386's with 4MB ram for networking and X stuff (1MB Trident ISA is good enough for any X client). Still FreeDOS makes more sense if you want to boot a DOS shell and run some obsolete app.

Since Knoppix came along I threw all of my MS-DOS boot disks away. If it can't run Knoppix, it's no worth rescuing it. If the PC doesn't have a floppy, there's always tftp/bootp solution to revive such systems.

Re:Fat32 Support

[Shurhaian]

If they did have to pay such a royalty, so would FreeBSD, as well as every Linux flavour I've encountered, because they all had Fat32 support. My guess is that as long as they don't use Microsoft code to accomplish it, and instead people just peered at the raw data until they figured it out, it's okay(or the FreeBSD project and anyone else who includes fat32 drivers does in fact pay).

Or is there some ultra-important distinction I'm missing? Wouldn't be the first time.

Re:I still use dos

[jonadab]

> I know DOS is archaic but I still use it. It's useful for apps when you want
> limited stuff in memory. Linux and windows can't compete with 100k kernal.

I don't mess with the embedded stuff. However, DOS has other uses too. I'm
not talking about having it be my regular desktop system, but it has uses.
Uses besides running legacy software, I mean. For one thing, it'll run on
pretty much *any* x86 system, irrespective of the details of the hardware,
and it has *no* trouble fitting on a floppy with plenty of room to spare for
utilities (partitioning stuff, filesystem utils, hex editors, disk editors,
whatever), and after it boots you can take out the boot floppy and just stick
in a different floppy. DOS was made to run on systems with a 360K floppy
drive (or worse) and it shows. If it happens to need (for reasons to do
with memory managment, presumably) to reread something from the boot floppy
again, it'll just prompt you to re-insert it, then prompt you again to put
the other one back. This can get a little tedious, but it *works*, and it
works under some pretty spartan conditions. (CD drive not working? Hard
drive still need partitioning? No problem.) This makes DOS really great
for things like setting up a blank partition table and installing a
third-party bootloader (OS-BS or BOSS or PowerBoot or whatever).

DOS is also the preferred OS to use for flashing your BIOS or testing your
hard drive for physical problems (especially if you only have one hard drive
in the computer).

In the last few months Knoppix is *starting* to displace DOS for some of
these things. Maybe eventually we'll be able to get by without DOS. But
I'm not holding my breath.