Slashdot Mirror
FreeDOS Turns 10 Years Old Today
Jim Hall writes "The FreeDOS Project turns 10 years old today! PD-DOS was announced to the world on June 28, 1994. The PD-DOS project was later renamed to the FreeDOS Project. We've come a long way in 10 years. Today, FreeDOS is ideal for anyone who wants to bundle a version of DOS without having to pay a royalty for use of DOS. FreeDOS will also work on old hardware, in DOS emulators, and in embedded systems. FreeDOS is also an invaluable resource for people who would like to develop their own operating system. While there are many free operating systems out there, no other free DOS-compatible operating system exists. Read more about the FreeDOS Project history in the About FreeDOS page."
DOS is still alive as a great platform for limited uses.
If you need some utilities to go along with freeDOS, try my site, Old Os or if you have problems setting it up try our forums.
Jay | http://oldos.org
FreeDOS aims to be a complete, free, 100% MS-DOS compatible operating system.
FreeDOS was previously known as "Free-DOS" and originally as "PD-DOS." For a little trip down memory lane: In 1994, I was a physics student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Most of my work for school had been done using DOS - writing programs, dialing up to the university computer, network, analysing lab data, etc. I really loved DOS; I did everything with it. I had a '386 desktop system in my dorm room and an XT laptop that I would carry around with me to do work "on the go".
I liked the simplicity that DOS offered. As a DOS user, you have the equivalent of 'root' access on your computer. Anything that you want to do on the PC is possible. Nothing is really stopping you, other than hardware limitations. I found that this additional degree of freedom was nice to have, although since I worked in both environments (UNIX and DOS) I tended to write programs that stuck to "safe areas" that worked on both platforms. DOS was great.
But that year, there was an announcement that Microsoft would stop support for DOS, that a new version of Windows was going to be released that completely removed DOS from the picture. Of course, this was Windows 95, and it still did have DOS, but at that time we all had the vision that Microsoft was trying to kill our favorite operating system. Everyone was pretty shocked. We didn't want to be forced to use Windows, which completely removes the command line. In DOS, everything is done on the command line, and a true command line "guru" can do amazing things there. In Windows, you are stuck with the mouse, and if the menus don't let you do something, it pretty much can't be done. So things were looking pretty bleak. We were all very upset about Microsoft's decision to ditch the DOS platform.
Then, I saw a discussion thread on the DOS groups asking "hey, why doesn't someone write their own free version of DOS?" Remember, this was about three years after Linus Torvalds announced his work on the Linux kernel, and by 1993 Linux had shown that free software can achieve incredible results. So in 1994, the suggestion that we could write our own free version of DOS, and give it away with the source code so others could work with it and improve it, really didn't sound all that far-fetched.
Unfortunately, no one seemed to pick up the ball. The idea sort of sat there, waiting. I didn't have much experience in writing C or Assembly programs (most of my analytical work in physics was limited to FORTRAN) but I had written some C programs. So I sat down one weekend and hacked out code for a bunch of DOS file utilities. I posted what I had done to the DOS newsgroups, and announced that I intended to form a group on the Internet to write our own free version of DOS.
I took the opportunity to fix some things. There are some things about what Microsoft did with DOS that do irk me. The biggest is that MS-DOS commands lack options, not that there are lots of MS-DOS commands anyway. I wanted to have more powerful tools than what MS-DOS provided me with. So I hacked some of my own. (I wasn't a strong C programmer at the time, so this wasn't very beautiful code.)
There were several "beta" pre-release packages of my stuff:
Afte
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
That's where you use DOSBox, a DOS emulator (mainly) for old games. It doesn't play all dos games yet but every release gets better.
Runs Descent, Descent2, Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall 2097 for me. Although DOS4GW doesn't work on it, but you can replace the extender with the Zurenava DOS Extender, for example.
The site's in Russian, but it's simple to use. You run it on the game executable to replace the extender it uses. After that it works fine. Some games seem to lock up on exit on my laptop, but everything works fine during play, so it shouldn't be a huge problem.
FD has been quite useable for many years. The fact its not reached 1.0 is mainly due to debates on optional features needed to call it '1.0', and not related at all to its stablity or useablity.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If one of those users wanted "complete control" of the computer - all they have to do is reboot the computer with an OS on a bootable CD (Knoppix, Gnoppix, etc). This can be done to take control of Linux, Win2K, WinXP, etc. NTFS is no obstacle, nor are the myriad of file systems available for use by a Linux installation. Encrypted file systems can prevent root access - but very few people have the time for this setup - plus recovery can be a real beatch.
The strong point of DOS is not being able to run another OS - it's being able to have more control over how you run certain applications. It can also facilitate recovery when things go wrong. The hardware requirements are less. Flexibility is a good thing. There is no need to port legacy apps that have been working flawlessly for years.
I personally dont use FreeDOS - I still have a Win98 partition with DOS installed. If I didn't own Win98 - FreeDOS is something I would explore for the rare occasions I would want to play old-school games.
DOS 6.22 (unsupported) can be downloaded free from: Micro$oft.com
I just did a bootable 1.44MB FreeDOS floppy that plays mp3/ogg files with MPXplay, and then put it on to a bootable CD-ROM with all the music content I like. Voila, free, open source, standalone car/home/whatever music player which does not need a hard drive (for swapping). Just boot from ATAPI CD-drive and play some tunes, even at your friend's house!
Now try to do that with Linux/Windows/*BSD.
I did it three years ago:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/mjbd/
Do you have ESP?
Tell that to Dell, yo. They ship FreeDOS on some of their boxes.