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FreeDOS 1.0 Released
Noksagt writes, "FreeDOS 1.0 has been released only a little bit later than planned. The 1.0 milestone is considered to be 'a stable and viable MS-DOS replacement' and features long filename support, HIMEM and EMM386 management, and CD-ROM support."
Dude, it was just released. Give it a chance to be used, before you complain that no-one uses it.
Someone put a tonne of effort into it, and you should have some respect for that at the very least.
No matter what Apple say, you're never going to convince a hacker with a copy of OSX that he is prohibited from booting it on a generic box. Where would Apple be today had it not been for the hacker ethos? Steve Jobs well knows the answer to that.
Actually, you almost certainly COULD get along using DOS as your home system these days. I'm at a loss as to why you'd want to, but it's not impossible. To get a decent range of functionality, however, WILL require that you use commercial software, not least to get an IP stack. Once you've done that, there's some old NCSA applications that support it, like telnet and even lynx.
If you want networked email, go looking for a very old version of pegasus mail for DOS; I think you can get POP3 but I doubt you can get any SMTP authentication methods whatsoever, although I guess you could manually pop-before-smtp or something...
The best use for DOS IMO is to run a BBS, but then, who wants to do that any more?
The most common use for DOS ATM is to run industrial control applications, because as pathetic as x86 is, doing x86 DOS assembler is really quite easy and was for a long long time by far the cheapest way to get anything done in terms of control systems. In fact most of the computer-driven machining equipment I've seen, even new stuff purchased in the last five years, is often DOS-based. There's a dinky, crappy PC inside a metal enclosure that probably cost more to design (per unit sold anyway) than your whole PC, and it's usually got some kind of interface board. The software is frequently still written in assembler because you may well neeed per-cycle accuracy to run your stepper motors or what have you.
The second most common use for DOS today is probably doing flash BIOS updates on PCs too stupid to load their BIOS without an additional program load.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm proud of these guys. Sure, it took 'em ten years, but they've made an OS from scratch that runs applications made for another OS. It's not an easy task. Just ask the GNU guys, or the Linux guys, or the Wine guys, or the ReactOS guys. Even if you don't see the utility of having a DOS clone, there are those who do, and I'll bet they're happy.
OS X can be bought off the shelf. Just FYI. It doesn't have to be downloaded or copied for someone else to have a copy on hand.
What one does with it -- install it on an Apple-branded PC vs. a big-box PC vs. a whitebox PC -- is up to the person who purchased it.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The moderators are the same as the posters. The only computing activities they know about are:
1) Games
2) Internet
3) Basic word processing
4) Compiling hello.c
It can do:
http://dos32a.narechk.net/index_en.html
I wonder if you've used modern music software. I've been playing with music software since the DOS days and while sure, there are neat programs for DOS, they don't compare to what's available for Windows/Mac today. Have you played with Sonar or the like? It's really just damn slick. I do have fond memories of things like Scream Tracker, and indeed you can get more powerful modern versions in the form of things like ModPlug Tracker. However once you've dealt with a modern sequence with a robust sampler playing samples gigabytes in size, with any kind of effects you can get a plugin for, it's real hard to go back to a text, spreadsheet like interface with tiny samples.
Now, I'll grant you, you can get the DOS programs for free, professional apps are expensive. However I think it's misleading to say the DOS programs "haven't been beat." I think they have, badly. That's no knock on them, there's only so much you can do when 4MB is a large program and you've maybe half that much RAM. However that's not a problem anymore, and it's nice to see what you can do with a modern system. Sure it's cool to see a MOD player with a robust cubic resampling engine to pitch shift a single note several octaves without distortion. However it's even cooler to have a 5GB sample bank that doesn't NEED pitch shifting, because all the notes have been recorded individually.
what grade would you get for rewriting DOS 15 yrs later, and would it be higher or lower than the Hurd guys get for taking 20+yrs to get to 0.2 (but doing it the "right" way, with a microkernel) ?
What a smart-assed comment. What's your point? That you think that you (or the FreeDOS guys) know more about OS design than Tanenbaum? I doubt that very much. Tanenbaum wasn't saying a microkernel was the "right" way. He was saying it was the modern way.
It took less than a year for two guys to build the Wright Flyer but a decade for hundreds to build the Concorde. Which design do you think an avionics professor would consider more modern?
Implying that Tanenbaum's opinion was wrong just because the GNU Hurd project has been slow is ridiculous. Tanenbaum is not and never was a Hurd developer. He shares no part in that fiasco. The failure of Hurd versus the success of Linux has little or nothing to do with the kernel architecture and everything to do with the respective project leaderships.
It gets more ridiculous when you consider the fact that Tanenbaum is a guy who implemented an entire microkernel OS (Minix) from scratch, alone. (And Linux would not exist had he not, because Minix was the thing that inspired Linus to write Linux to begin with.)
"5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU" - Andy Tanenbaum, 1992
You're quoting that as if it implies some lack of insight on Tanenbaum's part. He correctly predicted that a free UNIX clone would become dominant, even if he missed the timescale. It's true he was wrong that it would be Hurd, and not Linux. But that was a sentiment shared by Linus himself at the time: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)" - Linus Torvalds, 1991