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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?
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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.
...but when will it turn 1.0?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 $319, i can now afford to buy the 20 or so systems i was planning on for the business. nice
Considering that the original API's were based on CP/M, I don't think M$ 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).
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'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....
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)))();
Tell that to Dell, yo. They ship FreeDOS on some of their boxes.