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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."
FreeDOS is also an invaluable resource for people who would like to develop their own operating system.
:-).
Doesn't sound like the heritage I would like to learn from
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
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
I guess posting your website on /. counts as a Free Denial of Service(FreeDOS) attack?
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
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
Their project is basically a 16-bit wrapper of FreeWINDOWS product.
The real question is does it play those old games. I miss SimAnt, SimCity (the DOS Versions), Warcraft, Leisure Suite Larry, Space Quest, Heros Quest, Police Quest, Kings Quest and all the other old dos games of the time. Heaven forbid running these on MS-DOS.
oh wait a sec.....
...but when will it turn 1.0?
Actually the name comes from QDOS, the Quick and Dirty Operating System. Seriously.
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.
I use FreeDOS quite (well, relatively speaking) often, but only for one thing - flashing my motherboard BIOS. I got rid of floppy drives long ago, after my last one died back in the previous century, and haven't looked back. Usually, I'll download the FreeDOS ISO, inject the drivers into it and burn it to a CD-RW. Then just boot up from the CD, flash the BIOS and I'm good.
Unfortunately without VMWaare's fancy graphics drivers that don't work when the guest OS is DOS it was too slow to play the old game I was interested in (MOO 1).
(But, DOSBox worked once I played with frameskip!)
I think it's cool that we have these options today.
ReactOS uses a 32 bit port of freedos command.com as a cmd.exe replacement. It is 1000x better than that broken POS Microsoft ships with Windows that they call a shell.
I find it humorous that it's still in Beta after 10 years of development.
I'm not poo-pooing the effort, but you have to admit that that's a long time before declaring 1.0!
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.
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 ----
Funny that this should come up as I only noticed yesterday that Dell sells systems with FreeDOS now.
e .a spx/desktops_n?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/compar
This is great as I've been buying the cheapest SC servers to avoid the microsoft tax. With prices starting at $319, i can now afford to buy the 20 or so systems i was planning on for the business. nice
I have developed many systems running in DOS. A TSR will do pretty good when task scheduling isn't a big problem. But I do miss a good command interpreter. It's much quicker to write "ls *", rather than setting up the structures and calling the functions that read a directory in C. Wait... Is there Perl for freeDOS?
Considering that the original API's were based on CP/M, I don't think M$ would have much of a leg to stand on. In addition, Seattle Computer still retained some rights to DOS after it was sold to M$. Thirdly, back in the 80's, M$ allowed a couple of the big guys to sell their own versions - most notably Compaq with version 3.31 (first DOS to support more than 32 MB per logical partition).
You'll also find it on =80486 webservers. And yes, they do exist.
Hey, has anyone tried making this a DOS session on Linux? That would be sooo cool!!!
I don't see why some people dislike DOS.. Is it just because you teens have not ever used it, or your Linux/WinXP is so much cooler? Whatever, I don't care. You still have to use DOS to upgrade your motherboard/GPU BIOSes. You know what a BIOS is, do you.. I've even made one!
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 would have if I'd know how to do it. Preferably with a BSD system.
I was looking a player that could play tracker songs (you know, those before mp3s when 80386 and dinosaurs ruled the earth), mp3s and oggs, but no DOS player can do that as far as I know. XTC-Play could do tracker songs and mp3s, but not oggs.
I will eventually put a website of the bootable FreeDOS ogg/mp3 CD project. Maybe post it here..
I have decided to embark on a free Windows XP-like operating system. I plan to stick to a traditional Longhorn release time table; so the first release can be expected in the beginning of 2025. Also, I have very little experience coding, so you can expect numerous flaws similar to the ones already present.
I've kinda a strange question here...
Is there a way to Windows 3.11 on top
of Linux, short of VMware?
Should a person expect Windows 3.11 to
run on top of DOSemu and FreeDOS?
OR would the original Windows 3.11 +
DOS 5.x be expected to runon top of
DOSemu?
If anyone has a definitive answer, I'd
like to know.
DOSBox seems aimed more at games than general applications, which seems to explain why some of the nicer points of freeDOS (such as printing/netprint support) don't seem to work as well/easily in dosbox. Easier to setup though, and good for some of the stuff that dosEMU doesn't handle as well yet.
I'm still waiting for :
FreeAS400
FreeOS360
FreeOS/2 (dammit!)
FreeLinux - Oh wait. Duh! My Bad. I got a little carried away here. Nothing to see.....Move along....
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.
That post wasn't flamebait - it's a reasonable question.
Here's one example -- Steve Gibson released a new version of his SpinRite hard disk test/recovery tool. grc.com It uses FreeDOS so you can boot from a floppy and test every sector.
[I haven't tried the product, just noting one relevant modern use of DOS.]
Not yet. I have run 3.00a in 286 mode, however, but it's highly crashprone. I think a lot of the devs don't think it's worth the bother aiming for Win3.x compatibility, but if it don't run Windows 3.1x, it ain't 100% compatible...
Moll.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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.
I use FreeDOS to run quicken via SSH in an xterm on Linux. It works well, too!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Yes, dosemu needs a DOS to host. The standard Dos distributed with dosemu is freedos. Next question please.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
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)))();
My point is Windows 3.11 probably did the same thing - it just "hooked" into DOS. In other words - the write byte to disk was at 0x3748443 (making this up)
BTW - OS/2 was rewritten for the PPC NOT ported.
I've had better luck running games in newer versions of DOSemu. I'm running a 2.4 Ghz PIV and I couldn't get a decent framerate in anything I tried in DOSbox. DOSemu ran almost everything I threw at it acceptably. The biggie was Carmageddon.
I'll keep trying new releases. Either it will improve or I'll come into a machine fast enough to emulate a P75 with it. The following specs seem to cover all the ground needed to play games before the Win95 era began.
Pentium 75
Soundblaster AWE32
32 MB RAM
Trio64/VESA/CGA/EGA graphics
I'd estimate my current setup is closer to a P60 than a P75. The only fly in the ointment with DOSemu is that the OPL2/3 and wavetable stuff of the day may be spotty; you'll get sound effects but good luck with the music.
Well, not an API but a data structure, there apparently is for FAT, but it is under review.
The only rights to DOS Seattle Computer Products retained was the right to sell copies with hardware ("Expert C Programming", Lindauer, pg.169). The licensed versions of DOS were OEM versions (using the OAK - OEM Adaptation Kit). Basically, they were just branded with the "big guys" name and copyright, and in some cases included code to contend with non-100% IBM PC compatible hardware.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "free," but MS-DOS 7.10 was released (by Microsoft, of all evil empires) under the GNU Public License.
It's about as good a DOS as you'll find--and installs much more readily (and with a bunch of neat-o options) than FreeDOS, at least in my experience.
I always stick a little 30MB partition at the beginning of the first HD on my Linux systems and install MS-DOS 7.10 there so I can update hardware BIOSes, etc.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
The last time FreeDOS had a real distribution release was two years ago. Looking forward to 1.0 is all well and good, but a Beta 9 (sans the ugly graphical installer of the latest "we'll call it RC even though we would never consider actually releasing this as B9" releases, perhaps?) would certainly be nice.
Anyone have USB support for DOS?
Very interesting. What is the origin of MS-DOS 7.10? The web page says it has NTFS and USB support!
Say what you want about FreeDOS, and Free software in general. But FreeDOS has won. No one need ever pay for MSDOS, DRDOS, or PCDOS again. Those programs are dead. Surprisingly, a 25 year old operating system (even older if you count predecessors like CP/M, TRSDOS, and VTOS) still has uses.
While not 1000x better, as a previous AC posted, ReactOS is taking up where the FreeDOS project left off. If completed, it will replace more Windows and OS/2 systems than it's nearest free competitor.
Have you Meta Moderated t
for a moment, i kinda laughed to myself saying "who the hell would use DOS still"...
;)
yet at that very moment i had the lowly task of wiping hard drives clean and was using a utility called KillDisk.
i i popped it in and to my amazement FreeDOS began loading program files
If there's one program that I have used continuiously over the years to diagnose hard drive problems is Spinrite. I was especially pleased with Steve Gibson's commitment to keeping the program DOS-based. There were alot of diagnostic utilities that ran off DOS that I wish were still updated to support modern hardware. Hopefully others will follow Gibson's lead :)
In 1986, Seattle Computer was going out of business and planned to sell it's right to print DOS to a large vendor like Compaq. This lead to a lawsuit, and eventually a settlement where Microsoft bought them out for about $1 Mill. ("Hard Drive", Wallace & Erickson, 1992)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Tell that to Dell, yo. They ship FreeDOS on some of their boxes.
Since our church uses three programs that don't run on Slackware, I had to replace it with Win 2k Professional, which is decently stable and fits our needs. Well, I had one XP boot disk that booted into Windows ME (shudder), no utilities, and no way to access two CD-ROM drives that I needed to install 2k from.
To the rescue? Nothing less than Free FDISK and a Win98SE floppy with generic IDE drivers.
One MySQL client and a Win 2k installation later, and everything looks on track. Who says you don't need DOS anymore? (ahem... Microsoft...)
Thanks for another rescue, folks at FreeDOS!
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
I take it these are the same drivers ? http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10215
DOS is a true RTOS. If you want mission critical and fast, DOS does it. It can boot up in seconds, it's fault tolerant (reboot=fixed) and had full direct hardware access.
I have run a lot of operating systems. QNX claims to be an RTOS, Windows CE Claims to be an RTOS, neither are as responsive as DOS.
There is no stupid hour glass in DOS. Batch files make automation a piece of cake, and you don't need a degree in Computer Science to write one.
There are players for all your wonderful media types available. There are also a number of classic game emulators (Genesyst, Nesticle, etc.) available as well.
So, next time that video poker game sitting on the counter at your local bar goes kaput, just remember, it's still running DOS.... turn it off (unplug it?) and turn it back on, you'll doo the next poor drunk a big favor.
Thank you, have a nice day.
Make America grate again!
I use MagicISO.
I wonder how freedos will deal with 64 bit CPUs. I just read that Intel's 64bit CPU will no longer support virtual x86 sessions anymore. So this means no more DOS. Will FreeDOS deal with it?
Intel IA64 chips can emulate x86, AMD64 (and Intel's clones) supports x86 natively. Unless you enter long mode, it will act as fast 16-bit/32-bit CPU.