FreeDOS Turns 15 Years Old Today

Jim Hall writes "The FreeDOS Project turns 15 years old today! PD-DOS (later, 'FreeDOS') was announced to the world on June 28 1994 as a free replacement for MS-DOS, which Microsoft had announced would go away the following year, with the next release of Windows. There's more history available at the FreeDOS 'About' page and my blog. Today, FreeDOS is used by people all around the world. You can find FreeDOS in many different places: emulators, playing old DOS games, business, ... even bundled with laptops and netbooks. FreeDOS is still under active development, and recently released a new version of its kernel. A 'FreeDOS 1.1' distribution is planned."

Comments

Re:In case anyone is puzzled as I was

[Anonymous Coward]

My main use for FreeDOS is BIOS-updates for mainboards. Works beautifully.

Re:Bios Upgrades

[Jim Hall]

The one requirement I have for DOS is to do bios upgrades to older laptops which still requiring booting to dos. This seems to be one use case which I didn't have much luck with FreeDOS. Is that intentional part of the design (perhaps freedos protects the bios?) or was it just an incompatibility of the bios upgrade tool I have?

At a guess, I'd put this on the BIOS upgrade tool you have. Lots of BIOS updaters run fine on FreeDOS, and in fact several vendors such as ASUS [used to?] include a bootable copy of FreeDOS with their BIOS software if you got it on CDROM. The intention was to use this bootable CDROM to install the BIOS update from DOS.

I know that ASUS did this - at least as late as 2004 - because we wrote a technote on how the ASUS CDROM that came with your motherboard was borked. Specifically, it looks like they didn't bother to completely remove the "installer" parts, which made it easy to break your Windows system by [accidentally] installing FreeDOS on it.

-jh