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FreeDOS Not Dead; 1.0 Release Imminent
Lisa writes "Jim Hall, creator of the open source MS-DOS operating system project FreeDOS, says that while work on the project may have slowed recently, he isn't ready to throw in the towel just yet. In fact, Hall says he hopes to see version 1.0 released as soon as the end of the month." (So rumors to the contrary can be safely ignored.)
They haven't released anything in 12 years and its that lack of "recent" progress that's hurting them. What is it that I'm missing?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
No They don't.
I have used FreeDOS previously and indeed it has quite a bit of importance and valuable to use, both as an OS for older hardware, and as well, for running old DOS software games on newer hardware. I have run FreeDOS on Bochs for nostgalgia's sake, to run various old DOS titles. A fully MS-DOS compatable OS does indeed have many applications, such as running older software, nostgalgia, preservation of old computer operating systems, and for older hardware and modern hardware for which a small, lightweight OS is needed.
It means I can still play Duke Nukem 3D until DNF comes out. At least I don't have to worry about any lack of overlap in the DN releases...
Once we've gotten up to FreeDos 6.2, will the next release be Free95 (release date 2095), which replicates Windows 95 in a feature and bug-complete way?
But how does this change anything important?
http://www.uncoverip.com/
Oh well got to give him an A for determination right.
TheADDkid.com
Yes. Embedded systems vendors, firmware upgrade disk image producers, people who like the simplicity of DOS, PC manufacturers who want to get around Microsoft's refusal to OEM-licence windows to them if they sell PCs without any Operating System (Microsoft has a big, nasty industry campaign against "naked PCs"...). There'll be a niche "market" for FreeDOS pretty indefinitely, it's pretty much the "last DOS standing", since Microsoft gave up on MS-DOS. No, not _many_ people will care. But with Open Source, a few are enough.
You're the kind of nay sayer that says that since Duke Nuke'em: Forever has been in production for the last decade it probably isn't worth caring about.
... Apparently there might be some psychological drawbacks to waiting on such things.
I, for one, wait with baited breath for FreeDOS 1.0, and Duke Nuke'em: Forever... which will be out "when it's done." (Read: Any day now.)
Anybody who says waiting for vaporware is like watching grass grow is just crying over spilled milk the cow jumped over the moon the queen of heart of the problem child.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Everyone that builds network imaging boot CD's does.
Freedos rocks. Tcp/ip stack and all the goodies to make imaging machines from a network image repository with ghost of other dos based imaging apps a real treat/breeze.
universities love freedos, researchers do as freedos works on old Pc104 386 based boards for space based or rugged terrain data collection on hardware that the only collection app is an old dos one that will not run under linux. most machine shops love freedos as it's the only way to keep those old machines that use dos running instead of buying new CNC hardware and software for tens of thousands of dollars when the old machine works just fine.
I can go on for hours if you really want me to list everyone who cares about FreeDos....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Because.
(Oh, and also because FreeDOS running in a VM plays some wierd DOS games very well.)
Beep beep.
At work we found an ancient "portable computer" built by Compaq - we couldn't find any installer disks old enough to work with it so we installed FreeDOS. It wasn't really useful for anything, but it was fun - especially since most of us are young enough that if we have used DOS it was when we were children. Everyone was amazed that we got the old beast working. I'm sure somewhere out there is someone who needs DOS for something, if only an hours entertainment...
*crickets chirping*
Netcraft confirms it: FreeDOS is dying!
Anyone who needs to reflash their BIOS might be interested. I bought an amd64 machine, running gentoo and never purchased anything from Microsoft. So when it comes time to flash, I need to make a bootable cd/disk. And for that, I use FreeDOS.
Check out DOSBox
It's an excellent DOS emulator for Windows, Linux, MacOSX, BeOs, FreeBSD, OS/2 and toasters... Wait, it might not run on toasters. You may need to do a little fine tuning, but I haven't found a better way to run old DOS games.
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I use freedos on a floppy, with NTFSdos pro, to do some handy scripting changing registry entries on windows boxes without booting them. No other way I can thing of doing it, other than a liveCD of something, but that negates the point, as everything must fit inside about 4MB for my purposes. Also, occasionally, use a network freedos floppy, but I'm annoyed at the lack of a "universal" ethernet driver - even if performance is slow - rather like the universal 640x480 video driver in windows. Also, support for SATA drives is poor at best - and I can't find a driver for most chipsets. (although having said that even the windows XP install doesn't find most right!)
Hey, cool, man! I love Fritos too!
Oh, FreeDOS. Sorry, my mistake.
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
TW
Code monkey like FreeDOS
Code monkey like TAB and Mountain Dew
Now, if only someone will come up with a decent window-manager and GUI toolkit to run on top of it...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
DoubleSpace?
We use freeDOS to run many mission critical sytems at my work...Like VisiCalc and WordStar (both pop)
What was wrong with the DOS that came with the CNC machine?
Everyone that builds network imaging boot CD's does.
Or "uses", of course.
But networking in DOS, like just about everything else in DOS is still ugly, limited and painful. And if you remove the need to support a legacy application, it's usefulness approaches zero.
I can go on for hours if you really want me to list everyone who cares about FreeDos....
And I could go on about the what I see as my wasted years in the DOS world, to say nothing of the first few generations of Windows. To be fair, you are correct, DOS is still alive and well and very much in use, but my hopes for the new generation is that after using for the first time something like a Knoppix live CD is that they never even consider learning or using what the rest of did, and turn their noses up at the very thought of it.
> Freedos rocks. Tcp/ip stack and...
Does this mean that I can finally get my PC XT on the Internet?
Even if he's still going to make another few releases, FreeDOS is still dead.
MANY, MANY years into the project now, and yet compatibility with MS-DOS is in a rather sad state, the partitioning/formating programs create corrupt partitions that MS-DOS/Windows will choke on after a little bit or writing to. Many of the programs (Defrag?) still can't even handle FAT32, even though FAT32 has been around forever, and is largely obsolete now. What are the chances of FreeDOS 2.0 adding NTFS support?!
DR-DOS is still freely available, and a much better choice for boot floppies/CDs, as well as running old DOS programs (something like xmess will probably include 100% DOS compatibility before FreeDOS does).
DOS is too old and simple to be of any use in embedded apps as well. Projects like ELKS and ucLinux are far better options. It might be usable by companies' boot disks, but the limited compatibility might make licensing one of the many commercial DOS implimentations a cheaper and more reliable option.
The project is a zombie. It can continue walking on, but it's still long since dead, whether it knows it or not.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
A 32-bit multitasking DOS could still be "light-weight". Remember DESQView? I can't imagine(*) it would be all too difficult to add some sort of a supervisor to manage multiple DOS sessions. Any DOS box (box as in hardware) running an Expanded Memory Manager (such as EMM386) is already on its way there as the EMM continues to run DOS in V86 mode.
(*) In my imagination, there's a mysterious genius out there who understands every nuance of DOS and I86 hardware who's more than willing to put time into this. :)
"baited breath"
I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but with what do you bait your breath - worms?
And just what are you hoping to catch?
Adherence to the truth is a form of disloyalty.
> "FreeDOS-32 is along that direction."
> Hall says that software will include
> features like multitasking and flat memory
Throw in windowing, and you would have FreeDesqView-386.
sPh
You know, it would be nice if people would actually bother to do a little research before they post...
If you'd bothered to even glimpse at the FreeDOS web page, you'd see that the first priority of FreeDOS is and always has been to maintain a lightweight, completely DOS compatible OS. FreeDOS-32 is a completely different project. Any multitasking extensions (think DR-DOS in its latter days), GUIs (FreeGEM, notably, among others), etc... have always been planned after and as an adjunct to FreeDOS, not to replace it. There's still plenty of life left in DOS and the DOS environment. I for one would love to see a high-performance, single-user OS optimized for modern hardware without the cruft of the NT based MS OSs OR Linux.
And the beauty of a lightweight OS that uses the 32-bit flat memory model and has the 'hooks' for multitasking integrated should be apparent to some of us.
I mean, the multitasking sounds optional. A flat memory model would be really, really great for high performance tasks where you just want the core machine.
...Calls to participate in an open-source replacement for Windows 3.11 / Windows for Workgroups are now being heard...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
In fact, Hall says he hopes to see version 1.0 released as soon as the end of the month." (So rumors to the contrary can be safely ignored.)
Likewise, I hope to be married to Hallie Berry as soon as the end of the month. Unfortunately, I don't think rumors to the contrary can be safely ignored.
Just a guess here, but I assume he meant "bated breath." I also assume you knew that and are just being a dick.
so Sens youv got. nothin beter too dew then ignoure teh relivant parts-of-teh-post, and fokiss ownly on typographikal errs er othar misstaekes; then heers a hole "mesage four, you two tier apart. Hav phun. O, & Git a liefe looser.
I will have to throw together a Bochs environment sometime soon and try running Visual Basic for MS-DOS under FreeDOS. Because I can. And because it's a pretty cool 'dead-end' product from Microsoft, to be honest.
If you have an 8-bit NIC, sure... If not, the TCP/IP stack won't do you any good, and you just need the old SLIP/PPP programs for DOS.
SSHv1, Telnet, FTP, etc. There's even BOBCAT for a lynx-like browser, except that it's somewhat painful on an XT, and crashes after every ~20 pages you visit (out of memory).
It was only a couple years ago I still had an old 286 up and working this way. Not for any good reasons, mind you, just for the hell of it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
A long time ago, I copied my OS2 Warp installation CD to my hard drive; the CD is now someplace safe. In February, I used FreeDos to make OS2 Warp disk images from the hard drive, and installed OS2 onto an old 486. When the OS2 disk creation program is run under MSDOS 6, 7, or Win98 the 1.88 meg installation disks are created occasionally, and with agony; the dos window format of W2K and XP won't touch anything over 1.44 megs. FreeDos writes the 1.88 meg format easily on normal HD floppies, and all the floppies work the first time. Thank You FreeDos Developers!
Tcp/ip stack and all the goodies to make imaging machines from a network image repository with ghost of other dos based imaging apps a real treat/breeze.
I have found that netbootdisk works well with all of my disk imaging needs.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: What?
CUSTOMER: Nothing -- here's your nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: Here -- he says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER: Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not!
MORTICIAN: He isn't.
CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
DEAD PERSON: I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
MORTICIAN: Oh, I can't take him like that -- it's against regulations.
DEAD PERSON: I don't want to go in the cart!
CUSTOMER: Oh, don't be such a baby.
MORTICIAN: I can't take him...
DEAD PERSON: I feel fine!
CUSTOMER: Oh, do us a favor...
MORTICIAN: I can't.
CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
MORTICIAN: Naaah, I got to go on to Robinson's -- they've lost nine today.
CUSTOMER: Well, when is your next round?
MORTICIAN: Thursday.
DEAD PERSON: I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER: You're not fooling anyone y'know. Look, isn't there something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: I feel happy... I feel happy. [whop]
CUSTOMER: Ah, thanks very much.
MORTICIAN: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
CUSTOMER: Right.
A few things come to mind... 00. Will the project never get released if there is pre-release press about it never coming out? 01. Will the dozen or so users/developers bail out if there is bad press after release 1.0? 10. Is there actually anyone interested in using FreeDOS instead of a ripped/stolen copy of the real thing? 11. Is the FreeDOS project really cleanroom, or can we expect M$haft to come and stop this before it really starts. There are more questions to be asked, but I'm not sure I really care all that much other than to post something that makes me sound smarmy and cute. I'm still laughing at this post, and have to ask is the news day so slow today that this kinda stuff makes it out of OSNews and into /.-land... To be discontinued.
Yep, they surely do. Freedos is fscking brilliant for simple data collection/hardware control projects on oooold hardware (386 era stuff up, ie anything you have lying around). Does everything you need, backwards compatible with all kinds of useful software, and several orders of magnitude easier to install/use than its competitors. And most importantly (for me anyhow), it doesn't try to get between you and the hardware.
btw. I'm usually a linux advocate...
For playing legacy games on new systems it should be an excellent choice, shouldn't it? they may be old but games like the Dommander Keen series, Doom (yeah, I know, Linux and Windows ports exist and have for some time), and many, many other older DOS games are still just as much fun to play now as they were back when they were new.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
What prompted this?
...a realtime kernel library you can link into your code.
Most "high-performance" programs you write in full-on flat mode do this anyway. They either coordinate via the timer, vertical retrace, or hard drive/sound card DMA fill-request interrupt. And then they run a set of "tasks", that is, a bunch of potentially unrelated functions, in order, then return to the main busy loop.
So why not a small, RT kernel that lets you structure you program into seperate modules? It might provide you with some nice memory/syncro primitives that you can leverage. You can probably fit the text for a feature complete implementation with threads, round-robin and hard deadlines in 32K.
In this fashion you can potentially "schedule" a bunch of DMA requests, and then collect the "results" out of order. This gives you a bit more flexibility in your coding without having to roll up your own state machine and stuff.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Yes, a lot of people care.
DOS still has a large user base out there, espcially in the embedded and machine controller markets. So yes, people care.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but with what do you bait your breath - worms?
With whisp'ring humbleness, of course.
The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps. - Benjamin Disraeli
IME, those old games don't work that well with FreeDOS. You are much better off to get DOSBox
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
Courage is being scared to death - but saddling up anyway. -John Wayne
Interesting quote from a draft dodger.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Kind of like early versions of Windows?
so Sens youv got. nothin beter too dew then ignoure teh relivant parts-of-teh-post, and fokiss ownly on typographikal errs er othar misstaekes; then heers a hole "mesage four, you two tier apart. Hav phun. O, & Git a liefe looser. You correctly used two periods and one comma. That's a little careless, but my main concern is that, aside from the surrounding punctuation, there are six words in that message which are both correctly spelled and correctly used. Now, because some of the smaller words like 'a', 'on' and 'and' can be somewhat difficult to misspel, I was prepared to cut you a little slack. But you failed to misuse 'your' in place of 'you', and correctly spelled 'apart'. That's just sloppy.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Everything you need to boot an XT PC onward to today's PCs, format and/or do system installs?
Open-source too?
A very useful project!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Ok, I'm about blown away by the implementation of Parallels, not having a thing to do with this threat apart from your mention. Question I have is for 49.99 is Parallel's worth the price, does it really work well, and does the virtual rooted window of each OS get in the way as it has in the past like X11 in the rooted solutions of years gone bye? I'm very interested in the product, and may just move me from my PPC eMac (which is still a great machine 1.5 years old and going strong, albeit some service work that cost Apple 'retail' about 1700 USD on a 700 USD machine :) to a dual core mini... The life-time-bomb on this eMac is ticking now, mwhahahaha.
Umm that isnt hard to do, never has been..
Ever hear of SLIP or PPP? How about an 8 bit network card?
None of these things are new. I was running ethernet on an XT running X11 ( via desqviewX ) at least 15 years ago.. might have been longer..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Everyone here seems to be concentrating on FreeDOS running on x86. Which is fine -- x86 is the dominant architecture, after all, but I'd be really interested in a stable, minimalist OS that would run on other architectures as well -- perhaps architectures that there aren't any open-source OSes available for right now.
I'm thinking particularly about the old Apple machines (II series); it would be cool to get an OSS operating system and application stack (compiler, etc.) for some of the platforms that wouldn't comfortably run Linux.
Maybe even cooler than the Apple IIs (for which it's not terribly hard to find software for anyway) would be something that would run on some of the old minicomputers. Not sure how practical/possible it would be to target something designed for x86 for them, but if it's anywhere near feasible, it would be neat (if only from a geek perspective).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yay!
DOSEMU can still emulate some games that DosBOX can't touch, for example, you can run Duke3D at a very fast speed, even on older hardware (think 400Mhz P2). Why would you say that DOSEMU can't handle graphical stuff? DosBOX is optimized for games, and for the games it supports, it runs very well, but I dare say that overall, DOSEMU still has it beat.
Does it run Windows95?
Don't forget NetTamer (http://www.nettamer.net/tamer.html) which has a version that runs perfectly well on an XT, and there is now a palmtop version as well. The reg'd version even does IRC. And I believe it's still maintained. Sortof a text/graphics hybrid, but basically geared toward working in plaintext. Very reliable, once you get used to it.
There's also Arachne (works okay, tho its setup is quirky as hell) and its offspring WebSpyder, which used a 32bit DOS extender, and worked really well (at least, between crashes!) But if you needed a graphical browser on a DOS-only system, WebSpyder was the best of the lot.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Freedos 1.0 better have a working version of EDLIN. DOS just isn't DOS without EDLIN.
Not many people dodge the draft. It takes true courage to stand up and say No.
Yep, except without windows. Usablity of task switching without bloat, restrictions and requirements of GUI. Comfortable way to run multiple applications without forcing them to be written and designed in some highly specific way.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Can someone elaborate on this, any clues ?
I used to use edlin. Not for serious editing, but for small changes to files. My roommate made fun of me once. "Why don't you use a real editor?" My answer: "Because edlin will always be there, on every computer."
:(
Imagine my surprise when MS-DOS 6 shipped without edlin.
I hope you realize that DOSBox relies considerably on FreeDOS code for it's internal DOS implementation. If it weren't for FreeDOS you would probably still need a copy of MS-DOS to use DOSBox at all.
I think Digital Research had a multi-user version of DOS, supporting up to 16 users on one machine.
Anybody care to elaborate/supply more information ?
From the new UDOS site on Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/udos):
:)
uDOS is a free operating system built on the FreeDOS kernel with DJGPP. uDOS provides an integrated suite of features inluding Perl, Python, etc., as well as a Watt-32 based networking environment and ELF library support. Can be run live from CD image.
Discussion for UDOS currently takes place on irc://irc.freenode.net#djgpp
UDOS does a great deal to demonstrate what DOS tools are still out there, as well as the bugs they have! Many problems reported with the CD bootup involving LFN support, EMM386, etc. Not sure *nostalgia* is the right word for this kind of thing, but hey whatever...
Ah, and the ELF support isn't in just *yet*, pending release of DJGPP 2.04 so that the ELF patches can be made part of the core compiler as 2.05 (the last thing people need are *two* DJGPP distros). Now DJGPP just needs a release manager. Any takers?
FreeDOS is the only way to flash a BIOS using Free Software. Never mind the slow release cycles, it already works and it has helped me upgrade countless computers, without a single copy of MS-DOS on hand.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
What he did had nothing to do with courage. He swore he would sign up. Repeatedly. He even went through the motions once, but did not follow through. Plus, we are talking about World War II, not the current "War on Terrorism". Then, he makes dozens of movies where he is a war hero. Doesn't sound so "anti-war" to me.
For an example of a REAL courageous anti-war indiviual, click here
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Maybe they should start moving towards a graphical interface, then they're only 12 years behind of Microsoft and 20 behind Apple...
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
iirc early versions of windows could only multitask windows apps.
windows 3.x in 386 enhanced mode could multitask dos apps but at least for games it didn't work anywhere near as well as native dos. 9x was much better at it but your already getting pretty bloated by that point (and i certainly don't call 9x an early version of windows).
also iirc tcp/ip using the windows stack from a dos app was afaict a pita (ID software reffered to it as a delicate balancing act and iirc there was a seperate windows helper app).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
And for that I am thankfull. I like the concept of FreeDos and have tinkered with it several times in the past. On the latest trial I set up a full system to do nothing but play all the old dos games I had collecting dust. After getting everything setup, then I realized that the disk read/writes were too slow to be of any use. I left it doing a copy overnight and thought something was broke with the computer when it was only 5% done the next morning. I setup the machine to run win98 with dosbox. When running dosbox, it uses the natives OS to cache the read/writes making it usable. Using win98 let me install the older windows games too. If they get the disk read/writes working, I have several old dos programs at work that I would like to try and run on it. I am hoping that it will let me use hardware that only has dos drivers. Until then linux/windows with dosbox is a much better option for most pure software applications.
Here you go!
Wikileaks, no DNS
To all you lusers out there that think dos has no value, you are way wrong. I know there are many industrial applications like CNC where it is still in very common use. From my own experience I can tell you that it is *THE* platform for scan guns and automatic inventory management used in wherehouses and large reatial shops. Chances are pretty good if you have ever purchased anything in a large reatil store chain, or that has spent time on a self in a wherehouse it was scanned with a handheld scanner runing you guessed it DOS\>
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
DR had several operating systems that could be described that way. Their first was MP/M, which was loosely based on CP/M. Despite that (heh, I'm not a CP/M fan) it had a large following of users who bought it as a single-user multi-tasking OS, a good multitasking OS rather than a a multiuser one.
MP/M came in a variety of forms including MP/M86, and then was followed by Concurrent DOS. Concurrent DOS has limited DOS compatibility, but what it did it did fairly well, and in the mid-eighties a variety of computers were built to run it.
Finally, there's DOSPlus. DOSPlus wasn't multiuser, but it was the culmination of DR's work in different areas. It was largely DOS compatible, with a few exceptions which, needless to say, prevented many major applications from running. It had a multitasking system, though it was limited to multitasking CP/M86 applications (and I don't believe you could actually switch between them, they had to be background tasks, but I've read stuff that contradicted my own experience of the system); it was arguably DR's best single user operating system, followed later by DRDOS which sacrificed most of DR's innovations for DOS compatibility. DR could probably have come out with quite a nifty, powerful, system based on DOSPlus and GEM if MSDOS compatibility wasn't so important, and if they had the option of going 32 bit rather than being limited to the 8086 architecture.
I believe a sizable amount of this code is freeware and/or free software, as Caldera released a lot of it before they turned to the dark side. It's not always provided in an easy to work with form though, especially as the source code tends to be written in languages like PL/M.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I have lots of old games that stopped working at DOS 3.31 (which I am still looking for). I think DOS 4+ got rid of some old interrupts that old games required.
Well, CP/M {an OS originally written for the Intel 8080 8-bit processor, but which happened to work with the binary-compatible 8085 and Z-80 processors} used to support multiple users after a fashion. MS-DOS was originally QDOS, a cheap and nasty CP/M work-alike for the 8086 processor. QDOS was based on an obsolete CP/M version, and in any case Microsoft bought it before it was properly finished.
..... After a certain number of such "upgrades" it becomes increasingly hard to convince the public to upgrade, so you have to build in a Nuclear Option such as inherent insecurity.
Sometime later, the University of California at Berkeley managed to get a version of unix to run on an 80386 PC. This eventually became FreeBSD. And a printer manufacturer managed, by withholding driver source code, to annoy a hairy MIT hacker enough to motivate him to start writing his own operating system; which ended up almost complete, bar the kernel. Later still, a Finnish student got into a row with a lecturer about macro- vs. micro-kernels, wrote his own macrokernel {but, alas, no userland utilities} just to prove his point. Then a guy called Ian tried to pull a chick called Debra by combining the Linux kernel with the GNU userland. Amazingly, against all probabilities, the venture was successful on both counts and both couples ended up happily married; however, whilst Mrs Murdock liked her new name, there was much rumbling {and not from The Finn} that the other partnership ought to have kept both their names.
Whilst all this was going on, the creators of VAX/VMS {a somewhat temperamental operating system for the DEC VAX, a 32-bit extension to the venerable PDP-11} were sucked up by Microsoft and set to writing a replacement for MS-DOS, which it was hoped would also be portable to other processors {except for the slight flaw that the target processors would end up being discontinued before a port was ready}. This ended up becoming Windows NT. When it became apparent that Windows NT was worse than VAX/VMS, which was always seen by many VAX owners as the poor relation to BSD unix, Microsoft began ripping off bits of FreeBSD and grafting them into NT in place of the unstable parts. This was OK, because the BSD licence basically says "This is our hard work, which we tried to make available freely to everybody, but hey! if you want to pretend you wrote it, and lock it up so people can't have a copy of the Source Code, that's fine, we'll just rollover and play dead like good little doggies". The result ended up becoming Windows 2000 -- arguably the most stable Windows ever, though that's still a bit like saying "tallest midget". To make this new Windows even more attractive to complete idiots, a "Tellytubbies" theme was added and the name changed to XP so people would be able to spell it.
So yes, DOS should have been multiuser. But hey, if it had been right from the start, Microsoft would never have been able to sell upgrades. That's the Closed Source Way: Do half a job, then a quarter of a job, then an eighth of a job, and so on
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
DOS is one of several operating systems that I have installed and can boot-up into on my AMD Athlon 64 3800+ computer. I actually have PC-DOS 2000 (instead of FreeDOS) installed on the first partition of my first harddrive, it is a FAT-16 partition. When booting up, a menu appears that allows me to choose whether to boot up into Windows 2000, PC-DOS 2000. or one of several different versions of Linux. PC-DOS 2000 was a minor Y2K upgrade of the Last version of DOS that IBM had released. As you may recall, Microsoft and IBM each had their own versions of DOS since back in the 1980's Surprisingly, my AMD Athlon 64 can run more than just 64-bit software. I don't recall if DOS is 16-bit software or what, but it runs just fine on my AMD Athon 64.
The obvious question is why would anyone want to run DOS on a modern computer? Well, I have fond memories of tinkering with batch files, DOS commands and old DOS games back in the late 1980's and early 1990s. Every once in a while, I like to re-experience the retro experience of what it was like to run DOS. I do not boot-up into DOS very often, but I am glad that I can choose to boot up into DOS once in a while when I want to. Of course Linux, Windows or almost any other modern OS is actually better on a modern desktop computer for everyday use.
I actually have a mixture of Free-DOS and PC-DOS 2000 installed on the fat-16 partition. If I remember correctly, I did that by installing FreeDOS first and then later installing PC-DOS 2000 on top of it. Afterwards, I then manually edited the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to remove any wierdness that resulted from istalling both that way. I had a slight preference for the PC-DOS 2000 but doing it that way gave me all the extra free software and some Linux/Unix like commands that come with the FreeDOS. Am I the only one out there who occasionally boots his AMD Athlon 64 3800+ up into DOS?
There are actually several choices for running old DOS programs. One choice is Free-DOS. Another choice is DR-DOS/OpenDOS which, if I understand correctly, is a commercial product in which the source code of the kernel has been under an Open Source license. Another alternative is to run the free DOSBox emulator under Windows or Linux. Using DOSBox I have been able to run old DOS games such as "Commader Keen" under Linux and even managed to get my USB joystick and modern soundcard to work with it. Yet another option is to use VMWare to create a virtual machine for FreeDOS and run it in a virtual machine under either Linux or Windows. Even though their are other alternatives, I am glad to see that the FreeDOS project is still alive and about to release version 1.0.
Windows 3.1 won't run....
OpenGEM is a true continuation of GEM. GEM's source code and development SDK's were GPL'd by Caldera before Darl took over and they went insane.
Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit (whoever said that had obviously never seen Benny Hill), but that doesn't mean that using it makes you a dick.
Seems to me that Q[&]DOS was written faster than this, and with less advanced development tools twenty-five years ago. I guess coders are just getting soft these days.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Best name for a FreeDOS fork?
a) CheeDOS
b) DoriDOS
c) TostiDOS
d) FriDOS
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Have you tried.... DOSEmu? Windows command prompt, under WINE? VMWare?
I am not too clear on why OS/2 needs another DOS Box. The one the system ships with has been better than the real thing since the early `90's. I suppose if you need that PCjr machine mode for something, then maybe you will need DOSBox. That said, I have had FreeDOS windows and fullscreen mode available from my OS/2 desktop (along with a number of other OSes) for many years. I am glad to hear that development continues on it.
FreeDOS is actually bundled along with some HP laptops as this allows HP to say that they are selling a PC with an OS (which is necessary) to use the PC.
I understand that this is the only way, some companies can formally afford to unbudle windoze and other such products while selling new computer.
Should be reason enough to use freedos.
End
Actually, yes. I think that's the point.
Absent any pending interrupts, a task will run to completition in the same time it would take with or without interrupts enabled.
So, having support for hard realtime scheduling (when you know in advance why you are doing it) is not an impediment to getting things done quickly. The ratio of 5 minutes to one hour in your solitare example is hyperbolic and unrealisitic. With a modern system (one that could run FreeDOS) with a scheduling granularity of even something as extreme as 100us you would experience a degradation of about 5-10% with clock-tick handling overhead on a 1-2GHZ CPU.
But in the case of a single main idle task (something suitable for FreeDOS loader + some memory/kernel/tasklet code) you probably don't care about a periodic timer interrupt. You probably care about lower frequency or OOB type stuff (video retrace, sound card, keyboard, network card, etc.). If you do use the timer interrupt it's for one-shot type stuff... set and call me later type things.
I mean, the need for a task to "Go Fast" in this kind of environment is because you're threading calculations into a polling loop, or trying to fit them in between the receipt of one interrupt and needing them to be done and acted upon before the next. But you've got an environment that lets you handle interrupts switfly or on your own time... however you want to. So there's no need to disable interrupts and do things since you've got a fast, task-switchin', interrupt handlin' kernel that can do some of that for you. You make the decisions about what to handle and not handle, and when, at run time.
The benefit you gain is logical, code-level seperation between interrupt context code and the primary execution stream. And no need to poll to do I/O.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON