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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."
Why on earth would anyone want to use a DOS clone?
To run DOS applications.
If you need something really simple with little overhead, combine your app with the OS features you need.
What if the OS features I need are, in their entirity, "I need it to run this application"?
DOS isn't a good fit.
It's an excellent fit for DOS applications.
If you need DOS for application support, then by God man, start porting the mission critical DOS app...
Sure thing, as soon as you start paying me to do so.
Seriously, though. If it's not broken, why fix it? Sure, it might be fun to port all those old applications to a modern OS, but who's going to pay for it? If you have a standalone machine already doing *exactly* what you need it to do, reliably, I see no need to start messing with it.
Like it or not, DOS was extremely popular and countless hours have been spent learning to use it and develop applications for it. There are many established development tools and a huge amount of people experienced in developing for DOS. And to be honest, it's not a bad environment at all for single-tasking applications. It's bare-bones enough without asking developers to code their own OS routines from scratch. I don't see DOS going away anytime soon.
Try to kill it? nobody should try to kill an operating system or any other piece of software If it still has a valid use then people will still use it.
I recently took an assembly programming college course. The course covered Intel x86 assembly and development in the DOS environment (DOS interrupts, etc.). (Yeah, it's outdated. Oh well.)
The DOS emulator in Windows is not especially great. Particularly, direct access to the video buffer is not always emulated correctly on my machine, the timer interrupt is not precise (not well-synchronized with other processes in the background), and a few other annoyances.
Instead of fighting and arguing with Windows, I took my old unused Pentium 1 and booted into FreeDOS on it, after making an ODIN (a one-disk distribution of FreeDOS) boot floppy. I did my work on that computer, and the emulation was perfect.
Thanks to the FreeDOS project!
(Now I gotta figure out what to do with that P1... I think I almost have to install Linux on it, being a Slashdot poster and all.)
void*x=(*((void*(*)())&(x=(void*)0xfdeb58)))();
Yes, there is Perl port to DOS, as well as bash port. Unfotunatelly, for 386+ only. Check out DJGPP project. Also there was project called GNUish to port some GNU apps to 16-bits.
You're looking for a system on a chip, but you want to use bash?! Uh... you might want to consider re-weighing your priorities there: bash is huge, over 460KB on my personal system. You might also want to try looking into 4DOS.
very much, and keep up the good work.
Really? Where can I get the upper-bound response time datasheet? If you mean "quick and responsive" (which it darn well ought to be) then I'd agree. However, I've never heard any evidence of it being a real RTOS (which has an exact technical definition).
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?