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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."
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.
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.