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

What's it good for?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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) ... 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.

If you know about Linux, how the hell can you NOT know about FreeDOS?

Now, that said ... 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.