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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."
My main use for FreeDOS is BIOS-updates for mainboards. Works beautifully.
I'm genuinely puzzled by the people who can't figure out what a DOS-compatible OS is good for. Don't you people ever need to apply BIOS updates? Or run hard drive diagnostic software?
... and I'm sitting there shaking my head, wondering how they overlooked the alternate, DOS-based updater provided by the motherboard manufacturer (or whatever), and how the hell they can't know about FreeDOS.
... is anyone having a hard time getting FreeDOS to work with SATA optical drives? I never had a problem with parallel ATA, but I'm not sure I've ever managed to get FreeDOS to find and work with a SATA CD/DVD-ROM drive.
In other discussions I've actually seen people comment that an inability to apply BIOS updates is a big drawback for Linux ('cause the update applications they refer to are Windows based)
If you know about Linux, how the hell can you NOT know about FreeDOS?
Now, that said
You can find such a project here: http://www.reactos.org/
As far as I can see, Microsoft's track record at supporting legacy software is better than most.
Years ago I used FreeDOS to make dedicated hardware test stations. These were super cheap boxes with text only displays, an ISA extender card for the DUT, and a floppy. FreeDOS was a great way to use our existing DOS test code on the cheap. We had a floppy for each product type. Boot off the floppy, insert a card to test, hit one key and get an easy pass/fail indication. We had total control and the price was right.
In the age of PCI/PCIe I now do the same thing using Linux and a CD-ROM. You have a wealth of development tools, support for modern bus types and larger address space, and still no expensive per box software license.
I like to tinker... For some of this, FreeDOS is a ideal solution: I recently bought a box of old thin clients. They're all VIA x86 based with flash drive on CF cards. They all have serial ports, legacy parallel ports, USB and ethernet. They are small, don't draw much power, and are only like $15 each when you're willing to buy more than 5 at a time. That's cheaper than any dev kit based on any embedded processor that I know of, and certainly cheaper than using a dedicated PC.
Free-DOS is perfect for these... with an old DOS C compiler you can quickly whip up small programs that can do all kinds of things (Think parallel port = 8 bit DIO with dedicated control channels). If the job gets too big for FreeDOS to handle, I punt and install linux; but, for most simple things, DOS is really all you need.
I could write code to run on a microcontroller like a PIC or ARM, or anything in between. I could also write the code in LabView or a Microsoft .NET language to run on a PC. Why go to all the trouble and expense?
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