FreeDOS 1.1 Released

MrSeb writes with this excerpt from an Extreme Tech article about the latest FreeDOS release and a bit of project history: "Some 17 years after its first release in 1994, and more than five years since 1.0, FreeDOS 1.1 is now available to download. The history of FreeDOS stems back to the summer of 1994 when Microsoft announced that MS-DOS as a separate product would no longer be supported. It would live on as part of Windows 95, 98, and (ugh!) Me, but for Jim Hall that wasn't enough, and so public domain (PD) DOS was born. ... Despite what you might think, FreeDOS isn't an 'old' OS; it's actually quite usable. FreeDOS supports FAT32, UDMA for hard drives and DVD drives, and it even has antivirus and BitTorrent clients." The official release announcement has more details on the improvements, and the FreeDOS website has the release for download.

Comments

But what use would I have for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean seriously, how am I going to use it?

Running old programs maybe?

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Millennium]

Someone needs to make a CoreBoot-style bootloader that uses this. Then they could call it "DOS Boot".

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[rotorbudd]

To play Doom?

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[j-pimp]

I mean seriously, how am I going to use it?

Running old programs maybe?

POS apps. Embedded apps. Yes all legacy stuff, but even in a VM, emulating UDMA and a DVD drive is useful.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[sakdoctor]

Bit easier just to play Flash Doom

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same as for Linux. Program, learn, experiment.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do, in fact, have a FreeDOS VM for the purpose of playing Doom and Quake. One of these days I'll try Duke Nukem 3D, too. Not sure about Carmaggedon II, though.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[ruanime]

I mean seriously, how am I going to use it?

Running old programs maybe?

Yeah I would, maybe one day I can start that BBS that I always wanted.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[MightyYar]

Mostly I've used it for running old games (via DOSBox), but I've encountered it when using BIOS updates and other standalone boot utilities.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[TopSpin]

I actually used it extensively last November to develop an Option ROM BIOS extension. DOS is a convenient long real assembly code testing environment. Compile a COM program with NASM on Linux, use mtools to copy the output to the (live) VirtualBox FAT floppy image and execute in (Free)DOS.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I asked Dell to sell me a Vostro 200 ST with FreeDos instead of Windows and avoided paying for an OS I wasn't going to use.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have to ask... ...then it's a great time for you to learn about real-time, low level, low-overhead embedded devices!

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Enderandrew]

Does FreeDOS support fossil drivers?

Though in all seriousness, you can run a classic BBS over telnet with synchro.net and it is fantastic.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[TheGratefulNet]

DIL_

(system hung...)

Dammit! I gotta go rebuild dilo again. again!

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[SgtDink]

That's the funniest thing I have read in a long time.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

POS apps

I think there's a joke somewhere in there, having something to do with running windows on dos, but I just can't put my finger on it.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[hawguy]

I mean seriously, how am I going to use it?

Running old programs maybe?

I use it for installing BIOS and other hardware driver updates that need a DOS boot disk. The process goes something like this:

http://www.tummy.com/journals/entries/jafo_20080920_234755

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Cro Magnon]

I mean seriously, how am I going to use it?

Running old programs maybe?

POS apps. Embedded apps. Yes all legacy stuff, but even in a VM, emulating UDMA and a DVD drive is useful.

But don't most Piece Of Shit apps run under Windows?

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Hatta]

Since 1981?

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Joce640k]

He asked what *HE* would use it for...

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[hedwards]

You're better off using one of the more recent source ports. eduke32 is particularly impressive with HRP and polymer.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[pclminion]

Funny you mention fossil drivers and running a BBS over telnet, because I did exactly that back in 1995. The recipe is this: shell account on UNIX server. Custom fossil driver (written by me). The driver dials the shell server. The shell account runs a small daemon, ibbsd (also written by me), which listens on a port, and does a netcat-style copyover -- on the PC end, the BBS software thinks it's waiting for a regular modem call. The fossil driver does the magic there.

You could telnet myisp.com 14919 and get the Renegade login prompt. I never did get virtual multi-connections working, that would have required designing a real protocol between ibbsd and the fossil driver and, being a teenager, I didn't have the ability or wisdom at the time.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[sheehaje]

I think that BBS's over the internet loose a lot of the charm of what BBS's were in the 80's and 90's. There was something about being mostly restricted to an area code that kept BBS's more intimate, and I think a lot of the discussion boards a lot more interesting than the mostly anonymous discussion today. There was something to be said that if you said something to really piss somebody off, they might just drive over to your house to confront you in person. Not to mention the monthly user gathers at the mall or as part of a computer club. Things like FidoNet and the rare BBS that was able to host Usenet was very cool, but was a subsection of the BBS most times, and the main focal point was the local message bases. Then in the 90's, there were the Apogee distribution sites, and excitement would build when a new title was coming out.

A lot has changed, and most of it for the better, but I do miss the old BBS days. I've tried a few of the internet based ones for nostalgia, but nothing will capture the experience of being at the end of a modem either as a user or a SysOP.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[toriver]

Run it in VirtualBox - I had better success running some old DOS games in that combo than in DosBox...

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[MBGMorden]

While I can see your sentiment, I think to some degree it may just be a case of seeing the past through rose-colored glasses.

Back in the day the BBS's were great for someone who was first being introduced to anything resembling a networked computer. I had had a computer that I was hacking away on for a few years before I got my first modem, and once I discovered that I was pretty much CONSTANTLY on some BBS or the other. A lot of that time was browsing file archives, or playing games (Legend of the Red Dragon anyone? :)) . It was an exciting time, but it was also very limited compared to what we have today.

Heck one of the major challenges back then was actually finding out what the numbers to the BBS's were. Luckily I eventually found one around here (the Ashley Oaks BBS :)) that kept a running list of all of them in this area. It would call all of them on the list periodically and if they were unreachable for an extended period of time it removed them. It was great.

One thing that hasn't changed vs the internet though was that a lot of the BBS's had an "adult" image section. To a kid in his early teens that had a great appeal to it too :).

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Droog57]

Yeah, good memories.. I still have a couple of shoe boxes in my garage full of 3.5" floppies, full of 100-250k programs that I downloaded from local BBS's in the 80's. I kept them all, mostly because I'm a data packrat, but also because I spent SO much time downloading them all over my 1200 baud modem.. Doubt that they would even work nowadays, and I'd have to dig up an old PC with a floppy drive to even check. Oh, and if anybody cares, I have a full version of Windows 2.0 on 5 1/4" (floppy) floppies. No way to check that either, although it's been in a dry, EMI free place for many years, so decent chance of being functional. C:\> dir /w

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[LWATCDR]

Actually yes. I know of people that keep old dos computers around just to run one old program.
Also Embedded systems. DOS is light and small and does not get into your way. If you have a crash you can almost bet money that the problem is 100 your code.
Under DOS you can also bit bang hardware interfaces that would be difficult to do with anything else.
As to uses let me give you an example. Their are some old devices that used 3.5" floppies but with a custom format. There are programs for dos that can read that data. If you have one of those devices then this is exactly what you need.
And of course to flash bios.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Bruce Perens]

I had a motherboard that provided a ROM flash program as a DOS application. FreeDOS ran it.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Hadlock]

Quake for Steam ships with (I think?) DOSBox. Once you buy the game it downloads the non-DRM game and you could conceivably install it on FreeDOS. Other games, like the DOS version of Tie Fighter has some features (an entire campaign, I think?) that you don't get even in the Windows or Collector's Edition version. In both instances I ended up using DOSBox though.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[couchslug]

This is Farkdot, not the old Slashdot.

No technical posts plox. (runs)

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[hawguy]

A) Sounds like you don't care that it's FreeDOS, it was just what you used because the vendor used it.

It's true that I didn't care that it was FreeDOS, but I didn't use it because the vendor used it, I used it because the vendor gave me an EXE and said "Here, run this in DOS". I don't have easy access to a Windows machine to create a DOS boot disk (I don't even know if it's possible to do that these days?), I used FreeDOS.

So even if I don't care that it's FreeDOS, I use it because it's Free and it's DOS compatible (thus runs the application I needed it for). Which seems a bit like telling a Mac fanatic "Sounds like you don't care that it's from Apple, you only use it because you like the GUI and applications that run on it."

B) I'd like a better system anyway, for the whole process, but I've been wanting that for 20+ years anyway.

And yes, I'd like a better system too, I have some newer hardware that has firmware updaters that actually run in Linux.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Grishnakh]

With Linux, you get to learn about a real OS, which uses things like protected memory, processes, virtual memory, etc. If you come up with something useful, then you can deploy it on Linux systems everywhere or share it with the world so others can use it on their Linux systems.

With FreeDOS, you're only learning about an obsolete program loader. No one would create a serious application to run in DOS any more, because to do so would be utterly stupid. It's a lot like getting a Commodore=64 to learn about computers; they were fun in their day, but they're so utterly obsolete any more that it's pretty pointless unless you have a lot of time to burn.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[statsone]

to run a CNC machine. Great as MSDOS is no longer available. Prefect timing as I am planning my next machine.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Grishnakh]

Also Embedded systems. DOS is light and small and does not get into your way. If you have a crash you can almost bet money that the problem is 100 your code.

Any serious embedded system is going to be using either Linux or an RTOS like VxWorks. Having a computer that can only run one process at a time is pretty stupid these days, even in an embedded system. If an RTOS is good enough for avionics systems, then it's good enough for any other embedded system too.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[MichaelSmith]

POS apps

No, I don't think Eclipse runs in DOS.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

i have some computer graphic and / design programs that run under DOS. Some of my old games only run under DOS. my old DOS programs won't run in a DOS box in Windows 3.1 or Windows 9.x

plus, changing IRQ assignments are fun.

I remember and miss DOS. I still have a computer that runs MS-DOS and Windows 3.1.

c:
cd dos
scandisk

oh, and playing with EMM386 and Hymem.sys and the upper memery blocks is fun.
device high smartdrv.exe

i still edit my config.sys and autoexec.bat files using MS edit. Oh, and if windows 3.1 doesn't boot, i can usually fix windows 3.1 from a DOS floppy disk. Just saying...

ok, i'll go try Free Dos now.

Format c:
fdisk

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[LWATCDR]

Good enough but possibly not needed. I have seen DOS systems used for CNC controllers for example.
There are still good cheap dev tools for DOS as well.
Would I pick DOS for any project? Well I can think of one maybe but even then I might pick Linux. But then I know of embedded systems that still run DOS to this day. Hey Freepascal and I think GCC both still support DOS so someone is using it.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Hatta]

DOSBox runs its own DOS like interpreter, not FreeDOS. You *can* boot FreeDOS on it, but I'm not sure why you'd want to.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[hairyfeet]

Well just off the top of my head there is gaming, VMs for old programs, and industrial and embedded work. I have a client that has an $85000 C&C lathe they use for custom columns run by an ISA card that if my first "gamer" PC ever dies along with the spare i sold them (The gamer is a 100Mhz Pentium with 12Mb of RAM, the spare a 200Mhz Pentium II with a whopping 64Mb of RAM, both have DOS 3.2 from their original machine cloned onto them) then I'll be looking at FreeDOS to see if it'll run the software. I can understand why they want to keep that old thing going, not only did it cost an arm and a leg but it really does make beautiful custom columns and the software is easy peasy to use, just a shame the company went out of business in like 89 so good luck getting more modern software or a better than ISA interface for the thing.

But I bet there are a lot of machines just like that C&C that need access to DOS and thanks to FreeDOS that access exists even for modern hardware. Just because something is old doesn't mean it isn't still useful and valuable as that $85000 machines attests to. So my hat is off to the FreeDOS team, keep up the good work!

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

OTOH, if your computer only needs to run a single application, why mess around with UNIX? There's a lot of code there you don't need. Multiprogramming, timesharing, memory protection, etc, etc, etc are all irrelevant for some applications.

Imagine DOS with ext2/3/4 or NTFS support? 64-bit DOS? Way cool!

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Stormwatch]

Pfff... no music = no fun.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[mrmeval]

Hell *king no! We have a legacy app that will not run under XP period due to some bizarre memory management scheme. It will however run under dosbox. I have to support two other legacy apps that will only run under FreeDOS 1.0 running under VirtualBox set to be as braindead as possible. I will will evaluate 1.1 and see if it is more stable.

I don't have source code so can't even begin to port it to anything else and would not get the financing to do so if I had it.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[MightyYar]

It gives you some utilities that the built-in DOS doesn't have,

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Getting a Windows program to do what you want is sometimes like pulling teeth!

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Hamsterdan]

The Floppy version and Collector's (the DOS one) use iMuse for music, not the redbook CD audio.

iMuse makes the DOS version much nicer to play.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE#iMUSE

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[wvmarle]

You mean to this day BIOS updates require one to have to boot DOS?

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Nex]

Boards back in the day were pretty-much divided into two kinds, or a mixture of them: download boards and conversation, or convo boards. I used both, but hosted a purely convo board for 8 years (Walden Commune BBS in Montreal) back in the 80's mostly. I think the first poster's nostalgia concerned boards with lively message bases, while you're talking about download boards. Most had both, but they usually ended-up being either one or the other. Nex

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[bejiitas_wrath]

Better to use chocolate doom for playing your Doom games, it has a good OPL styled music playback and the original setup program that works on Linux with Ncurses.

Get it here. Works very well on Fedora Core 16.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[arth1]

Great as MSDOS is no longer available.

If you have an MSDN subscription, MSDOS 6.0 and 6.22 are available for download from Microsoft.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Daniel Phillips]

I mean seriously, how am I going to use it?

Running old programs maybe?

Flash rom upgrades for all kinds of devices. It's the standard.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[dissy]

He asked what *HE* would use it for...

No, he really asked what everyone else would use it for.

Absolutely no one but himself (or herself) can answer the question of what he personally would use it for. There is no point to stating the question out loud for others to read, knowing no one could give them their own answer.

By asking that question in public in a form where replies are expected, the only possible interpretation that would make any sense is asking what possible uses could it have. And thus why all of the replies are exactly that.

Additionally, by taking the effort to ask the question, while at the same time taking the effort to not look into what the software is, it is obvious the only correct answer is "Nothing at all". He knows that, and we know that, and you should know that too.

And yes, by reading over the summary where links are provided to answer the question "What _could_ it do?", and reaching for the "Post" button, it is safe to say he put effort into not looking into the matter.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Hadlock]

What is a fossil driver

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Grishnakh]

That's what RTOSes are for, and that's why they're used in fighter jets, where you not only need guaranteed latency, but the ability to run multiple processes.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[petman]

Actually yes. It does simplify matters because DOS is basically -inert- when no program is running (save for a clock tick handler), meaning nothing at all to interfere with a BIOS updater.

Actually no - not always, anyway. My recently purchased motherboard allowed BIOS updates directly in BIOS, reading the updated firmware file off an external USB drive.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[petman]

So what you're saying is that dentists are expert Windows users?

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[MstrFool]

'I mean seriously, how am I going to use it?'

              'With a keyboard' is the simple answer. But I expect you meant something more along the lines of 'What use would I have for it?' And the best answer for that is, If you have to ask that question, it seems likely to me that you won't.

                It's for those of us that are the sorts of geeks that don't need to ask that question. Not everything is for every one. If you have no use for something, then don't worry about it. Just move along and let the rest of us worry about what we will do with it. Personally, I plan to try it out for fixing systems for by getting around an OS that has the hubris to tell the owner what they are and are not allowed to do on a system they own. I'll also likely fire up some of my old games as well, though I'll likely need to dig up a copy of 'moslow' to slow the system for the games that ran off of clock ticks rather then actual times. Heh, Stellar 7 on a 286 16 mzh was playable... But even the slowest 386 and the game was over before you could twitch.

The better question, and the one most folks look to be answering is 'How are you going to use it?'. From the looks of the replies the short answer to that looks to be 'Any way we can think of'.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[RockDoctor]

We had shit applications before there were Windows. Hell, Windows 1.0 was a piece of shit DOS application, and Windows 2 was only a little better. Things didn't get reasonably stable until Win 3.11 with it's 13-odd year working life (some very odd years, others merely uneven.).

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[leereyno]

FreeDOS is, like every other open source project, a labor of love produced by those who are intrinsically motivated to do so.

YOU are not really part of their plan.

They do it for themselves so that they can have a better toy to play with.

If you're not interested in sharing the joy of playing with this new and improved toy.... it really doesn't matter.

It is unfortunate that FreeDOS couldn't have been created sometime around 1985.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Phoghat]

Hey, I know, we could start up a company in Timmy's garage, I'll write some programs, and Betty can sew the costumes !

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[shutdown -p now]

Doubt that they would even work nowadays

DosBox does wonders there. Or you can always set up a full-fledged VM with DOS.

I'd have to dig up an old PC with a floppy drive to even check.

There are USB floppy drives out there, and they work great in practice.

(I actually have a special dedicated box for oldskool gaming and such, but it's more a fancy of mine than an actual requirement.)

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[DaVince21]

Embed failure. "Missing plugin" when I have Flash installed.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[statsone]

I don't have a MSDN subscription. Have you looked at the cost of even the basic one?

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[MBGMorden]

Yeah - I will say that due to my age (about 10-12 at the time) a lot of the BBS discussion didn't hold a lot of appeal at the time. Just not a lot of people in my age bracket on the BBS's back then.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[Hamoohead]

What is a fossil driver

Fido Opus Seadog Serial Interface Layer.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[operagost]

It's probably using VCPI. The few games that used that were pretty much obsolete as soon as Windows 95 came along. Too bad, because a few were decent. But VCPI made the stupid decision to run in ring 0, defeating the whole purpose of protected mode.

Re:But what use would I have for it?

[mrmeval]

Thanks, that seems to explain it. I know dosbox handles the DPMI stuff we have without too much pain. I looked and VCPI is a) an abomination and b) has very limited support for specific games in dosbox.

Writing Viruses for AV

[Synerg1y]

FreeDOS is surely #1 on the list to require AV, I'd say it's safer than mac in regards to security through obscurity. AV not to be confused w a firewall, the latter helps quite a bit.

Re:Writing Viruses for AV

[Kenja]

Right... because prior to Windows 95 there where no viruses! So there's NO WAY that the old floppy disc you have with your copy of Elder Scrolls could possibly have a virus on it.

This is DOS we're talking about. There has never been a more virus filled OS in history. What kids today think of as viri are just worms and trojans. DOS has REAL virus issues. Self replicating bastards that attach onto other executables.

Re:Writing Viruses for AV

[scharkalvin]

Ha. I remember a co-workers computer running DOS getting a virus and it was throwing out random error messages. Mostly "Drive C: out of paper". (I'm NOT making that up!)

Re:Writing Viruses for AV

[CSMoran]

FreeDOS is surely #1 on the list to require AV, I'd say it's safer than mac in regards to security through obscurity. .

Your PC is now stoned.

Re:Writing Viruses for AV

[roman_mir]

yeah, I wrote a number of DOS viruses back in the day. Today it's not as fun.

Re:Writing Viruses for AV

[Arker]

Heh, that reminds me, I actually wrote a bulletproof AV for dos back in the day. Windows broke it so it couldnt be fixed. Havent thought about that in years. Maybe freedos will catch on to the point it would be worth reviving it. Probably not though.

I'm now waiting on FreeQEMM

[SensitiveMale]

and FreeDESQview as well.

Re:I'm now waiting on FreeQEMM

[soup4you2]

FreeStacker ?

Re:I'm now waiting on FreeQEMM

[DarkOx]

FreeDESQview would be amazing, I still have my toy zeppelin.

Re:I'm now waiting on FreeQEMM

[Hatta]

There's already a free Qemm. Or rather, a free expanded memory manager. Several in fact. I've had very good results with JEMM.

Kid's first OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd use it as the first OS my kid uses, and then move him/her on from there ... so he/she gets the 'full' experience and can kick it old-school.

Re:Kid's first OS

[meloneg]

Kids these days! It was *AMAZING* when I upgraded to a PC w/ DOS. Third system, if I recall correctly.

Re:Kid's first OS

[brillow]

Why not just start them with linux? Is to too pornographic?

Re:Kid's first OS

[Anonymous Coward]

"I told you, tou're not getting your kitten back until you configure HIMEM.SYS and solve that IRQ conflict with the Gravis UltraSound!"

Re:Kid's first OS

[Droog57]

yeah, the bitch goddess of memory management..

Re:Kid's first OS

[FoolishOwl]

When I look for jobs, there are more job openings for Windows sysadmins than Linux sysadmins, but still more which expect familiarity with both. I've not seen any jobs advertised calling for familiarity with DOS.

Re:Kid's first OS

[shutdown -p now]

There was no need for kittens back in the day - we did it so that we could play X-COM and TIE Fighter.

To this day I doubt that I could repeat the setup I had at 12, that was there to get ~620Kb base memory with the mouse driver loaded, needed just because some odd game would bark on anything less.

Is No One Excited?

[eno2001]

I remember the early days of Slashdot where this would have everyone talking. It's pretty damn cool. At this point it's prefect for reproducing real old school gaming. DOSBox is great for that too. But look... you're running a real DOS here! No VM needed! Pull out your 486! Get out your 1994 era Pentium 90! Relive the days when computing was actually fun! I installed FreeDOS with GEM (which was the better GUI compared to Windows back in the day until Apple ruined it by suing Digital Research) on a laptop from 1998. That thing is a BEAST now. Seriously, doesn't anyone get excited about this stuff anymore?

Re:Is No One Excited?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Anybody who flashes BIOS ought to be excited.

Real CDROM support means we should be able to have a .288 file that doesn't need to be mounted loopback and modified with mcopy for every different flasher. An big BIOS images aren't a problem anymore.

One stock boot image that gets written to the ElTorrito sector and then jump to the CDROM drive to continue execution of the startup script.

Boilerplate FTW.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Pharmboy]

I am, so that likely brings the total of excited people up to 6, maybe 7. Everyone else is busy marveling over their iPad and iPhone (oooh, round corners....) and other walled gardens. Like you, I miss being able to actually communicate directly to the hardware, from the command line. I miss hand tweaking my config.sys and autoexec.bat files to squeeze out an extra 500 bytes (yea readers, 1/2 of a kb) of lower RAM. Using QEMM and DesqView to quazi-multitask by multiple line BBS on my 486 with 4mb of ram. (3 lines, but I still have plenty of ram left for a prompt to do maintenance while monitoring chat) There was a certain empowerment that came from operating a computer back then. We actually knew exactly how much power the system had, because we easily found ways to saturate it, just to get every ounce of power out of it. Back then, we did things just because we COULD, and we enjoyed learned from crashing and burning stuff.

I also remember the good old days when the Internet was hard to use. THOSE were the days. No spam, no popups, and if you could find a website, likely it had real information on it because only computer "experts" and universities had servers. The days before the "Browser Wars", when every Congressman didn't know what the Internet was, instead of now where they know what it is, but still have no idea what it is. And who could forget BBSes, Gopher, and Veronica, Archie, and password protected FTP accounts brimming with goodies like Wolfenstein.... :)

That said, I don't MISS those days, but at 47, I'm glad I got to be a part of those days, and the days before that with CPM, portable computers with 8086s that weighed 50 pounds, original Macs, and even a VIC 20 with no storage device. You can't recreate them, or duplicate them, so those days are gone for good. It's up to us to create new ideas to eventually become "the good old days".

Re:Is No One Excited?

[sunderland56]

If someone released a new version of the Model T Ford, would you expect many people to be excited? Would you buy one?

Re:Is No One Excited?

[eno2001]

Buy! Never! Something that clunky should be FREE!!! ;P

Re:Is No One Excited?

[SirGarlon]

If someone released a new version of the Model T Ford, would you expect many people to be excited?

Absolutely! Haven't you ever been to an antique car show? If Ford put the Model T, or an updated replica, back into production I think it would create a lot of excitement.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Nutria]

Using QEMM and DesqView to quazi-multitask by multiple line BBS on my 486 with 4mb of ram.

Bah. OS/2 FTW!!

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Slashdot today is more of a political geek site, where a specific demographic comes to rant about copyrights, the DMCA, Apple, etc. Probably generates more revenue that way. I remember when programming articles used to make it to the front page.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Nostalgia is a deceptive mistress. It tends to glorify things that weren't objectively good but carry sentimental feelings. You miss communicating directly with hardware and editing DOS startup files, but the DOS developers who had to support everybody's esoteric PC hardware sure don't. In fact, those days were a step back from the initial push in the 60s and early 70s toward higher-level abstraction that we've only now come back around to but took a detour from during the initial commoditization of low-end PC hardware. But you explained why you liked it--a sense of mastery that mentally justified the time investment.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[cmtuan]

But will it be street legal? Doesn't new cars need to have ABS/airbags/tire pressure monitoring, meet emission and crash protection standards and who know what else. So even if Ford made a new Model T, I don't think it will look anything like the old Model T.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Just Some Guy]

Anybody who flashes BIOS ought to be excited.

Along those lines, as of two months ago there was no downloadable ready-to-use USB image ready for dd'ing to your handy flash drive. I wrote up the steps I took to make one on OS X using VirtualBox. I've spoken to James Hall about making the resulting image file available for download directly from freedos.org, but it looks like he hasn't taken me up on it yet.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[rubycodez]

so submit a programming article

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Droog57]

This brings up an excellent point that I've been considering for a while now. I was forced to work with a Win7 PC and absolutely hated the changes made to Explorer. I looked at some boards and saw that I am far from being the only one with the same issue, but 99% of those posts were replied to with (paraphrasing) "Get with it, new is good". No, it's not. It occurs to me that most Computer/SmartPhone/Tablet manufacturers would rather that you didn't have deep access to the OS or file system. And tailor all current OS's to limit access as much as possible. I bet that 10 years down the road, you won't be able to see the root of your HD no matter what you (legally) do. And therein lies the pernicious nature of "Upgrades". LESS power to the people, and power to the people was the driving force behind the PC revolution in the first place. We have been had by Apple, MS etc. They want total control. I know it sounds like I wear a tinfoil hat, but think about it, it's where we are heading, and Apple is, perversely, the worst offender. If Woz wuz dead (sorry woz, I know your out there), he'd be rolling already. PS, can freedos run with 16gb of RAM?

Re:Is No One Excited?

[rubycodez]

There are free realtime OS where you can talk to the hardware directly, but that is not the best for a general purpose personal computer for the masses. But you can still play, invent or tinker if you want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_real-time_operating_systems (columns where source model == open source)

Or you can write a driver for Linux or a BSD kernel....yes more complicated, hence more fun.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Drinking Bleach]

Computing in these days are more fun than mucking about config.sys just to get a program to work. But maybe that's just me.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[geminidomino]

Agreed. Fuck that. I miss TIE Fighter, Ultima 2, and PROCOMM+ terminals pointing at old BBSes. I don't miss having to spend 4 hours tweaking a three-level config.sys menu to squeak out an extra 2k out of 8MB of ram...

Re:Is No One Excited?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Oh, nice. Maybe you'd be willing to put up the blank image as a torrent?

Re:Is No One Excited?

[bill_mcgonigle]

nm, reading comprehension fail.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

After working years in support, no. God no. People don't need to be more empowered to shoot themselves in the feet.

You're advocating they either have better guns to shoot themselves with or more feet. Or both.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[eno2001]

But that's where the fun came from. You learned the config file enough to get your system to do things it wasn't intended to do, or do them better than anyone who didn't mess with the config. These days, the only thing that makes one person's device more "fun" than someone else's is largely up to the developers of the web service or app and it's not as easy to get your system to outdo someone else's other than by paying more money for something "better". That's no fun.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Hadlock]

I recall getting in a lot of trouble for swearing in front of my parents for the first time while trying to resolve an IRQ conflict. I thought I was done with all that in win95 but I still had to wrestle with it to solve a conflict between an isa token ring adapter and my generic brand soundblaster. Ugh. Plug n play, my ass!

Re:Is No One Excited?

[arose]

I remember when programming articles used to make it to the front page.

And science, and computer security. Oh, wait, those are both there. I'll get of your lawn anyway, no need to hurt yourself chasing me off.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[noobermin]

At least in the last statement you realize now there will be other's good old days. I'm not sure if your deep introspection realized that at that time those things were novel and new like the iPads and the iPhones and the iWhatevers and were uncharted territory like what the internet is (at times) today.

People drag on "these kids" just like your parents dragged on you for not going out and getting a real job/education/whatever...

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Droog57]

You totally miss my point. Yes, if I'm at work, restrict me to your hearts content, I don't care. But on my personal device, stay the hell out of my way. If I mess things up, TFB for me, I will have to deal with the consequences of my actions (and BTW, in all probability learn something in the process). See this link to see how people can actually die because of hand-holding software, an extreme case yes, but in principle, an appropriate comparison. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877

Re:Is No One Excited?

[SirGarlon]

You mean, sort of like the way FreeDOS includes large file support, memory management, a CD-ROM driver, etc. -- none of which were present in the original DOS? Just like a street-legal Model T would look somewhat different, I would presume FreeDOS does not, for example, fit on five 3.5" floppies? ;-) Yes, the modern user has additional requirements, both for FreeDOS or a Model T.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[gl4ss]

tie fighter rocks, one of the best space combat games. in retrospect way, way way much better than wing commander ever was - even the story - and the graphics were good enough, would be good enough in high res for decent entertainment now too, they do their work. included short story book wasn't bad either. graphics aren't everything, what they portray is. ultima 6 had a world 20 times bigger in content than dragon age 2. that's what I miss about some older games, more time was put into what the content is supposedly portraying, now it's just graphics artists tweaking the theatre-layer, adjusting waistlines and nipples on scenery.

I'm 30. the only computers we had at home were pc's, starting from 20mbyte hd + 360kbyte floppies.. dos was what we started with, the realtime aspect teaches that computers are just machines, not magic boxes - circumventing copy protection by making it ask the same question always with a simple .bat does that, editing levels with pctools does that(what an awesome program that was!). if I was younger by even few years I'd have missed the last days of bbs's and the early days of internet as well, it's not much now, plenty of people like me around, but in 20 years it is.

I haven't seen freedos being actually ran in a while though, should maybe try if virtualbox + freedos would be better for some antique sw than dosbox. freedos installations might be pretty good for a school class actually, just have a text editor there, compiler and some other things, if the students mess around enough to install some tcp/ip solution on it to get on the net then at least those classes weren't a total loss. back in elementary school the pentium classroom we had was setup so that it would just make c: a clone of a networked drive at every boot - that taught us to use pqmagic(so our games wouldn't get nuked). dunno if the teacher ever figured that out, but boy the sw they had bought to keep us from doing exactly that certainly wasn't worth the money.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Teun]

Old fart ;)

Re:Is No One Excited?

[gl4ss]

as a sidenote, it's only this year that I truly understood the wisdom of interfaces that are green text on black background (guys with glasses, think about it, minimal color shifting and having only a thin band of the spectrum (those who don't get it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrective_lens#Abbe_number ). if you use white on black the blue and red shift considerably near the lens edges, black on white is fail too, green on white is a fail too.

black text with emboss effect on gray background IS _THE_ FAIL.

making everything on pc interfaces a "picture of the real thing" is just multifail as well.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[klui]

I'm interested because it appears to have limited USB support--UHCI only, no OHCI, EHCI, or xHCI. There is also TCP/IP. The last remaining feature that would be very useful is AHCI support.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[lgw]

The modern equivalent of the Model T is the Tato Nano, and I thought is was an exciting development. The Model T was a cheap car anyone could afford, and the Nano get back to those basics.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[lgw]

I don['t know about that - the hardware tweaking is still a lot of fun. I still build my own PCs (just to keep my geek card from expiring), and building and tuning a gaming rig can be a lot of fun, and a lot of frustration. Getting striped SSDs to actually perform well was every bit as much "fun" as config.sys bashing, and all the overclocking stuff, but the result is quite peppy.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Pharmboy]

I remember installing OS/2, the bullet proof OS. I wanted to see how long it took to crash it. Not long, I found. Less than 3 seconds. But still, it was cool. But it wasn't command line, justifying every single byte of memory, using EzyCom BBS software and creating a RAM drive exactly the same size as the overlay, so the three instances could share it. OS/2 was cool if you have too much RAM, and it started the whole "the operating system is an application" era, more so than even Windows did, in my view. That was the beginning of the end of computers as pure hobby, imho.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[lgw]

Win 8 is apparantly worse, in terms of what you can control. But the Win 7 file manager is just a poorly-written app. I wrote my own a few years back as a way of learning WinForms - I think I'll try to find that: even a half-assed effort is bound to be better than the one built in to Win 7.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Pharmboy]

Nostalgia is a deceptive mistress. It tends to glorify things that weren't objectively good but carry sentimental feelings.

Very true, like how we remember the good things a relative did when they pass away, and forget how they used to bop you in the head to take your place on the couch. Or worse. We do tend to glorify our own past, to romanticize it. And again, I don't want to go back there, but I'm certainly glad I got to experience it first hand. I would like to think it makes be a better technician, at the very least, because I understand that behind the pretty do-clickies is just a bunch of copper and iron, swapping out 0s and 1s.

And I think it gives me a deeper appreciation than someone whose first computer was running XP, and came out of a pretty box that had a large sign showing you how to connect the power cable, and to plug the green plug into the green port, purple cable into the purple port, etc. From my experience, younger people are quicker to accept the stated "limitations" of a given system, instead of having a curiosity about it, and a desire to work around those limitations. They are less likely to dig into the startup section of the registry and disable half the crap you really don't need. They are more likely to have multiple toolbars in their browser. They tend to think that the power of the system is limited only by the CPU, the GPU and the RAM, instead of the chipsets, the running services, and the devices. Not all, but way too many that actually try to make a living working on the same computers they don't really understand.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[metalgamer84]

I have OS/2 Warp 4 running in a VM right now...why? So I can make this statement as needed.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

For me it's the other way around.

I have a job doing technical work; being able to grind my brain against bare metal is a great thing. However, I don't want to come home and do another for free on a device I paid for.

My point was that if you look at the average user's equipment... You'll see they really don't give a shit about bare metal. I don't want to have to do shit work anymore. "Post-PC" to me means, "I don't have to be OCD about my home directory."

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I remember when, a good 20 years before slashdot, you learned programming by typing in video games from magazines!

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Nutria]

I wanted to see how long it took to crash it. Not long, I found. Less than 3 seconds.

v3 was unbreakable on my white box machine.

But it wasn't command line, justifying every single byte of memory

Then you were doing something wrong.

OS/2 was cool if you have too much RAM

4MB RAM was *not* "too much RAM", even in 1994.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[justthinkit]

I prefer WMP to Explorer and they have broken that as well in Vista/7.

.
Given that MS is in the business of selling new, yet Windows development has stagnated these past ten years, they have to make it worse in the short term to achieve their goal. I predict Windows 9 or 10 will offer features we haven't seen since Windows 2000, touted as "new interface improvements".

Since each of these feature subtractions could be a show stopper, someone should set up a site delineating them to help "de sell" Windows #Number.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[evilviper]

I remember the early days of Slashdot where this would have everyone talking.

Yes, back in the early days of /. was when it could have had some relevance, too. It was sadly a decade late to even pick up the last few places DOS had an important niche.

I know, because I was one of the people here on /. initially interested, but it took a long time to materialize, and once it was usable, it still was unreliable for the simplest use cases like FAT partitioning/formatting that could be read by most OSes.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[mattack2]

I also remember the good old days when the Internet was hard to use. ...and if you could find a website...

You newbies and your websites.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[evilviper]

Everyone else is busy marveling over their iPad and iPhone (oooh, round corners....) and other walled gardens. Like you, I miss being able to actually communicate directly to the hardware

1) Why do you "miss" it, when it hasn't gone away... Just start dicking around with odd storage controllers in your system, and you'll find youself learning the intricate details of initrd right away, in a panic probably.

2) Funny you'd mention iPhones, since Android firmware is probably the place the most people are working very closely with hardware... closer than the dos days, with no BIOS or standard IO/mem addresses for components. Tougher in a lot of ways.

3) 16-bit real mode isn't exactly "hardware". You've got a friendly BIOS layer wrapping up the details for you. You might as well play with (u)EFI or such firmware to get your low-level detail fix. Oh yeah, and server OoBM (BMCs).

   

Re:Is No One Excited?

[drsmithy]

4MB RAM was *not* "too much RAM", even in 1994.

OS/2 in 4MB of RAM was something a masochist might do. 8-12 MB was pretty much a requirement if you wanted to actually exercise any of that pre-emptive multitasking. At least until something locked up the SIQ.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[drsmithy]

You totally miss my point. Yes, if I'm at work, restrict me to your hearts content, I don't care. But on my personal device, stay the hell out of my way. If I mess things up, TFB for me, I will have to deal with the consequences of my actions (and BTW, in all probability learn something in the process). See this link to see how people can actually die because of hand-holding software, an extreme case yes, but in principle, an appropriate comparison.

Then why do you want your hand held by FreeDOS ? Surely the only way you compute is by flipping switches and watching flashing lights.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Nutria]

Hmmm. Did I have 4MB RAM or 8? The more I think about it, it's likely that I had 8MB.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[dissy]

Now those were the days!

You spend hours typing in a multi-page program, with hundreds upon hundreds of DATA commands and mind numbing random looking values, to finally run it and get a 3-foot banner of an Alfred E Neuman face on your dot matrix printer.

Or spending days typing in a program, getting errors, double and eventually triple checking every line on the page with the LIST, continue getting errors, seriously considering retyping it from scratch to find the bug, only to discover in the next months issue that they swapped around some line numbers in a bunch of IF statements and it wasn't your poor typing after all!

Or spending an evening completely zoned out typing in a listing from a magazine, and only 5 lines from the end, the power goes out for a split second and wipes most of your RAM.
The screen comes back up with garbled text, flashing squares, characters from all up and down ascii, with a few lines of your program showing just to taunt you.

Anyone remember SoftStrip scanners, and what looked like 1"x10" long QR codes?

I still have my full collection of Nibble Magazine somewhere in the attic too.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Overly Critical Guy]

I and others have tried. The editors won't publish programming articles.

Re:Is No One Excited?

[gl4ss]

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

try that.

good thing with windows is that customizing it with free stuff is quite usual.

fwiw the explorer in 7 isn't nearly as crappy as any iteration of finder..

Re:Is No One Excited?

[shutdown -p now]

This. I use amber on black exclusively for night reading this day (albeit on an OLED screen, so that blacks stay black).

Re:Is No One Excited?

[Pharmboy]

I've run OS/2 in 4mb of ram. It was laughable. It would boot fine, as long as you didn't run apps. It was adequate with 8mb of ram, but only that. If you had the RAM, OS/2 kicked ass, it was just ahead of its time vs. what was affordable in the hardware to run it. Way better, and earlier than Win95, too bad IBM has a history of shooting itself in its own marketing foot.

Screenshot of 1.1

[sootman]

C:\>_

(Hmm, never noticed how much that looks like a clown smiley.)

Re:Screenshot of 1.1

[jones_supa]

I wonder how many times a day all around the world still some ordinary fella stops to ponder why the heck do the drive letters must start at 'C'.

Re:Screenshot of 1.1

[w0mprat]

C:\> ... To a whole generation of kids, your just drawing odd smiley faces.

Re:Screenshot of 1.1

[peppepz]

The default was just A> back then.

Re:Screenshot of 1.1

[bythescruff]

C:\>_

That looks like Mohammed holding a gun to me.

A new OS?! This changes everything!

[brillow]

Does it have an app store?

Re:A new OS?! This changes everything!

[bananaquackmoo]

Though I know you were joking, that isn't a bad idea. It could make FreeDOS money and make application discovery easier.

Re:A new OS?! This changes everything!

[RDW]

Yes: http://www.techdigest.tv/ironic-3.5-inch-disc-posters.jpg

Re:A new OS?! This changes everything!

[FoolishOwl]

It's a funny graphic, but certainly not in any way ironic -- unless perhaps it's ironic that hipsters are making the classic joke about how the rapid pace of technical innovation makes them feel old.

Re:A new OS?! This changes everything!

[Em Adespoton]

http://www.freedos.org/freedos/links/ -- and most of the stuff is free or shareware :)

Re:A new OS?! This changes everything!

[wvmarle]

That brings memories.

Bad memories.

Of long nights going through large stacks of 3.5" disks trying to re-install a crashed system, only to find that the final disk has a CRC check failure.

Invaluable for our lab equipment

[blind biker]

In our labs, we have a shit-ton of expensive analytical and other scientific equipment which is controlled by some DOS-based software. We have been installing FreeDOS on replacement computers, and are all deeply grateful for its existence.

Re:Invaluable for our lab equipment

[griffinme]

If you want to monitor a serial or parallel port in real time you need an older os like DOS. WinXP, NT and newer made it hard to do this. That is why programs that control stepper motors or gather data through a serial port use some flavor of DOS. That is why some CNC machines use DOS.
For example:
http://www.dakeng.com/turbo.html
http://deskam.com/
http://www.luberth.com/cstep/software.htm

Too late!

[eminencja]

A year and a half ago HP might have bought it for a billion!

No LiveCD?

[roguegramma]

Come on, in the days of dos you sometimes had to boot from floppies and now all I can have is a pseudo live cd which is only good for installing itself to the HD?

I guess this is really meant to be used with a virtual host?

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[Dwedit]

Windows ME had DOS just like Windows 98 did, Microsoft just disabled it. You can hack several bytes, and you get DOS back again.

You must be thinking of Windows XP or Windows 2000, which did not have DOS.

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[Anonymous Coward]

You *got* to be trolling!

Windows ME = Windows 4.90.3000 (Notice how they wanted to say: This is probably the last version of 4.)
Windows 98 SE = 4.10.2222
It was still the same line. And it still was DOS inside with Windows 4 / Chicago on top.
They just gradually hid the DOS away more and more with each version. But it was still there. Since it had to be.
Only with 2000 did they start with the "emulator". Because it was a completely different OS. (NT / OS/2 line).

FAIL.

(Free)DOS can still be relevant ...

[DigitalDreg]

DOS and FreeDOS are still relevant in some niche areas:

- Turn-key and embedded hardware often use DOS
- Retro-computing: Some of us like dragging out our old hardware to play with it
- Learning to code closer to the metal; DOS gives you enough services to get you going, while giving you a feel for embedded programming

FreeDOS runs on almost everything from an original IBM PC (1981) to a virtual machine under VMWare and VirtualBox. People (hobbyists) are continuing to work on the utilities to keep it refreshed. For example, in the last year there was a new set of TCP/IP programs added, a utility for sharing folders with a VMWare host, and a new web browser based on Dillo.

It's not for everyone, but if you are curious check it out - it's pretty painless to run in a VM. (Or you can drag out your XT or Pentium 90 for the full effect.)

Re:(Free)DOS can still be relevant ...

[Lumpy]

"- Turn-key and embedded hardware often use DOS
- Retro-computing: Some of us like dragging out our old hardware to play with it
- Learning to code closer to the metal; DOS gives you enough services to get you going, while giving you a feel for embedded programming"

All of these are better served by using a hand rolled linux. You can roll a linux kernel, FS and busybox that is smaller and far more capable.

I have a old PC-104 386 motherboard acting as a robot that runs linux that I play with regularly. I can get drivers for things like webcams that you cant get for dos.

Re:(Free)DOS can still be relevant ...

[TechyImmigrant]

>All of these are better served by using a hand rolled linux. You can roll a linux kernel, FS and busybox that is smaller and far more capable.

No. Hand rolling linux is hard. Installing Freedos takes 2 minutes, mostly that 2 minutes is spent rummaging in the draw to find the usb stick with the install image on it.

Re:(Free)DOS can still be relevant ...

[Anonymous Coward]

All of these are better served by using a hand rolled linux.

Not necessarily. I spent most of the last decade working on the Point-of-Sale system for a very large QSR (Quick Service Restaurant, i.e. "Fast Food"), and we had over 100,000 computers in the field, running MS-DOS. I *think* they were all at least 80386-based, but I do know that many of them had as little as 2 MB of RAM.

I'm not aware of any version of Linux that would allow us to operate in that small a memory footprint.

BTW, there are still hundreds (probably thousands) of stores still happily running the old, DOS-based system.

Re:(Free)DOS can still be relevant ...

[dissy]

"- Turn-key and embedded hardware often use DOS

All of these are better served by using a hand rolled linux. You can roll a linux kernel, FS and busybox that is smaller and far more capable.

So wait, you mean my CNC machine, which uses a DOS program to talk to an ISA controller card to run the machine, would be better served on Linux somehow?

How would you manage that exactly?
Seriously, I would love to know. I spent a good 4 days researching this very subject. My very first thoughts were "How can I get this to run under Linux?"

First, Linux won't even run DOS executable. Fail.
Second, userspace apps such as DosBox can not modify system memory to communicate to ISA cards. Fail.

Yes, this is a specific DOS program. Of course it shouldn't be expected to work anywhere else.
But you did say ALL cases would be served better by Linux, so that includes the cases where you need to run a DOS exe that flips bits in memory to talk to hardware, and access to the exe source is not an option.

When searching for a replacement computer for the failing Pentium 90 that controls the CNC, I spent quite some time attempting to find a way to run this on something more modern, IE something that could be easily and cheaply purchased.

The best solution I was able to come up with for a modern computer (~2-3 years old now, but a year old at the time), was to run Linux with an ISA-to-USB converter chassis, connected to a virtual box session running FreeDOS.
No matter how you want to twist that mess around, DOS is still the required component to which everything else there exists to support.

There would be much less overhead to just put MSDOS directly on the newer machine, but of course that isn't really doable since none of the newer hardware is supported, and legally speaking one can't get a new license for MSDOS, which could cause problems if I was to prepare the same setup for similar machines at work.
Especially so for work, I have to think about what might happen after I am gone (Be it move to greener pastures, or get hit by the proverbial bus)
I can't stick them with a pirated MSDOS copy, and would prefer an easy source for replacement pieces.

FreeDOS is the answer. It does support new hardware, and still runs the old executables.

It's also worth noting that even for the second item on GPs list:

Retro-computing: Some of us like dragging out our old hardware to play with it

Not all games work under DosBox. Sure, a whole lot do, and no doubt they would want to add support for those non-working games. But for the games it does not support, you need DOS in some form.
This also assumes that games are the only "retro" computer use you can think up, as dosbox is not good for much outside of that scope.

I'll grant that learning to program closer to the metal would be better served elsewhere.
Linux if using modern* hardware with more than "I just wanna" as a goal, or to teach fundamentals I would go with an 8 bit CPU that one human mind can fully understand all of.
Personally I would choose the 6502 for that task, but there's nothing wrong with any of the older simple micros.

* Modern meaning 15 years old or newer

Re:(Free)DOS can still be relevant ...

[Lumpy]

Installing it to a dumb pc? yes

Developing on it? not a chance. Software development on DOS is a LOT harder than linux.

So that covers the first and third item. you only seem to care about #2

Re:(Free)DOS can still be relevant ...

[shutdown -p now]

There's no point using Linux if you don't need more than one process/thread, and the only way you interact with hardware is with the text-mode monitor (think TUI... its actually surprisingly efficient compared to many modern TUIs) and, say, a COM port for some proprietary external equipment with which you communicate directly.

Re:(Free)DOS can still be relevant ...

[TechyImmigrant]

>Installing it to a dumb pc? yes
>Developing on it? not a chance. Software development on DOS is a LOT harder than linux.

Booting dos on an as yet unreleased microprocessor is a lot easier than booting linux or any other big OS. I'm not developing applications, I'm testing silicon. Do what's right for your task.

Writing code on dos is no great hardship for an old crusty like me.

Re:(Free)DOS can still be relevant ...

[evilviper]

many of them had as little as 2 MB of RAM.

I'm not aware of any version of Linux that would allow us to operate in that small a memory footprint.

Here you go:

http://elks.sourceforge.net/

It hasn't seen any development in the past ~5 years, but it always worked, and it'll run on an 8086 just fine.

WTF?

[Cyberax]

You are totally wrong. ME had not replaced DOS with an emulator, DOS mode had just been removed from the startup menu (and could be returned with a simple tweak).

It was impossible for 9x-era OSes to be much more advanced than ME, mostly because of limitations of the underlying 16-bit kernel code. For example, no SMP, primitive USB drivers, rudimentary memory protection and non-reentarble code (DirectX apps could hang the whole OS by forgetting to release a surface), etc.

Re:WTF?

[Arker]

You could return a secondary shell to the startup menu but it was blasted tough to get a primary shell on ME. This was the single biggest annoyance about it, but far from the only one.

ME sucked unimaginably, I ran 98SE trimmed with 98lite on the home/gaming machine as long as that was feasible instead, and when that finally broke too much to be born winXP was out. And I held onto XP through the era of Vista. Win7 is tolerable again. I see a pattern here, and I dislike these efforts to charge me good money (and more importantly freedom) for a beta OS every few years.

Re:No LiveCD? soon

[FudRucker]

give them a few days, i am sure there will be a live CD soon, what i want to see is a file server full of abandoned DOS games

DOSbox versus/vs. FreeDOS for old DOS games...

[antdude]

Does FreeDOS work well with old computer games like in DOSbox?

Re:DOSbox versus/vs. FreeDOS for old DOS games...

[eno2001]

Not really. But think of the fun you'll have trying to figure that out! :)

Re:DOSbox versus/vs. FreeDOS for old DOS games...

[antdude]

Bah. Have fun from games but not trying to make them work. Oh yeah like the old days with free conventional memory, EMS, XMS, etc.! :P

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[cbope]

Almost got it right. Yes, they did more or less neuter DOS in ME, but the well-known stability issues of ME were also due to MS trying to remove much of the underlying 16-bit code from the OS and make it "more" 32-bit than 9x. DOS was of course a part of this underlying 16-bit code, although hacks could bring part of it back.

And fails for....

[Lumpy]

The damn HP palmtops. They had to use the Bizzaro PCMCIA chipset in those that NOBODY supports and the freaking crap dos drivers will not load in FreeDOS

And yes, a Dos Palmtop is very useable. IT works great as a RS232 analyzer for integration.

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[vux984]

Windows ME *REALLY WAS* the most stable of the win9x's.

No, it was worse than 98 SE.

It added a lot of new stuff that didn't work great.

Windows 2000 was supposed to be released in "Professional" and "Home" editions. But the home market just wasn't ready for NT as too much stuff the home market used didn't work.

Printers, scanners, mp3 players, and so on lacked NT drivers. Too many games and utilities didn't work.

So only windows 2000 pro ever got released, and then Windows ME was created released to update Windows 98.

When XP came out the market was a lot more ready for NT at home, and we got XP Pro and XP Home.

Windows 2000 Pro had been really successful as both a business OS and had made a lot of inroads in the home market as well, so the NT driver situation was much improved, and most of the new games and utilities and hardware supported both 2000 and 98.

Raspberry Pi

[Possan]

Someone should port it to arm an put it on the Raspberry Pi... that would be an interesting embedded combo.

Re:Raspberry Pi

[shutdown -p now]

It would be hard to port DOS to ARM in a meaningful way, because it doesn't really have an API - it only has an x86-specific ABI (INT 21h etc). Furthermore, most DOS apps also used PC BIOS services, and many also used direct memory access to operate devices.

So if you ported DOS to ARM, you wouldn't have much software to run of it, even if you tried to recompile it.

helps boot stubborn thin clients

[rubycodez]

I love to make servers and appliances out of thin clients. But some of those thin clients refuse to boot GNU/Linux or BSD from native file system in external device, or in some cases from large (>2GB) partition. But they will boot GRUB in a FREEDOS partition.

FreeDOS + Raspberry Pi

[CFBMoo1]

Would make an interesting combination for people who used to have old computers hooked up to TV sets for monitors like I did back in the day. Even though Raspberry Pi is using a few flavors of Linux, having a DOS option like that would be awesome in a retro kind of way.

Re:FreeDOS + Raspberry Pi

[Anonymous Coward]

Raspberry Pi is using a few flavors of Linux, having a DOS option like that would be awesome

Good luck porting DOS to ARM.

Completely agree.

[sconeu]

When I bought my Athlon (1.1GHz!!! 512MB RAM!!!!) in 2001, I insisted on Win2K pro instead of WinMe.

I loved 2K. I liked it much better than XP.

I ran 2K at home for about 7 years before I finally bought XP (pro). Went to Win7 Pro 64 when I upgraded my mobo/cpu/ram again.

recently installed it

[rubycodez]

os/2 had settings too that might need twiddling, file control blocks (FCBS), buffers, RMSIZE, vemm.sys, etc.

Here's why I'll look at it.

[dennis612b]

I have some legacy products that started their lives on PC-104 boards running DOS. getting TCP/IP support onto these was arcane and generally miserable back when we started. New boards can run Linux and have great features but one great thing about DOS is it loads your app and gets out of your way. We're able to do real-time control in the 100 uS realm because of that. The only thing I need is access to more of the onboard RAM, everything else is just fine under DOS. I'm donning my asbestos suit now....

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[steelfood]

I don't recall the specifics, but I believe re-enabling DOS was more difficult than that. I reall it involved outright replacing the files emulating DOS with the actual DOS executables.

Either way, what you say doesn't invalidate what I said. That you had to "hack several bytes" to enable real DOS is orthogonal to the fact that the prompt was an emulation, and the internals weren't present (or at least weren't being used). And it doesn't invalidate the fact that the lack of a real DOS was the cause of most of Windows ME's stability issues.

The NT line always had DOS emulation. And it is an emulation because a lot of the DOS commands don't work in the NT line. But that says nothing about the 9x line or how and why it ended so abruptly with the flop of ME.

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[TheRealMindChild]

No, it was worse than 98 SE.

It added a lot of new stuff that didn't work great.



That is your retort? Why did you even reply?

Here, let me give you a way to test this. Create a virtual machine of win95, 98SE, and ME. In each one of them, open a DOS window and type "ipconfig /renew" (so it isn't a plain DOS program, but a window program that interfaces with the DOS console). Open a DirectX game next. After closing the game, try and use the machine. Win95/98SE WILL crash and burn. WinME will not.

Am I the only one

[Cro Magnon]

who misses the old 8 character filename limits?

FreeDOS is in frequent use

[maxbash]

I just used SSD firmware update CD, it used FreeDOS. I see it used all the time for firmware updates and hard drive checking tools. Just last week I used Seagate's Seatools to check a drive. After the Windows version found a problem it instructed me to check it again with their Dos based disk. Dos is still actively and preferably used for tools that need low level hardware access.

Re:FreeDOS is in frequent use

[omnichad]

I just used FreeDOS last night to run SeaTools on my main hard drive. Whole computer froze when trying to launch FreeDOS. It still doesn't support AHCI mode on SATA drives. I had to go into my BIOS settings and roll that setting back to IDE compatibility mode to get FreeDOS to load.
 
I do wonder if 1.1 adds support for AHCI.

Motherboard testing

[jones_supa]

I think motherboard testing still utilizes DOS based programs. This is one of the advantages of it, to give you access to the hardware without nothing getting in between. You have probably seen clips from the factories before, but this Gigabyte Nanping video shows at 08:30 some examples of DOS4GW-spiced tools to write test patterns to the chips. It would be interesting to meet the guy who makes the software.

Ignorant bliss

[Kjella]

I was listening to my dad about computers the size of rooms and vacuum tubes, when I grew up with it the fact that you could stuff the power of a 286 into a PC was like a thing of wonder. Then I look at my iPhone and realize I didn't have a cell phone or any Internet at all, never mind that it runs a million circles around the 286. Kids today will think I grew up in the stone age just I thought my dad grew up in the stone age. I don't think it really matters where you are in time, you'll look much the same on the past, present and future. I think it's part of a mental coping mechanism working like a Goldilocks zone, we muse about the past and the future but overall we're happiest living when we did. We're a product of our time, I can't really imagine myself growing up 20 years earlier or 20 years later and still being myself. I like being where I've been because it's what made me into the person I am today.

Re:Ignorant bliss

[Pharmboy]

I don't think it really matters where you are in time, you'll look much the same on the past, present and future.

Yes and no. While 47, I always had a computer, but I was always in the minority until around 2000. I'm at a perfect age (and profession) that I remember when the company I work for, and have since 1993 (I was 29), first went online in 1997. Then we went full ecommerce in 2000 and changed the entire structure of the company, from being a local seller, to a regional power, to a manufacturer, to now being one of the largest in our industry and selling in all 50 states, and we still have the rest of the globe to work on (not easy for our products). Back in 1993, no one knew what email was except those of us that ran a FidoNet link.

Someone who is 29 today isn't going to be able to have the same experiences at all, nor learn the same lessons. Every two bit company is on the internet at one level or another, but back then, we were cutting edge, and compared to the rest of our industry, we still are. Anyone can be "global" by putting crap on eBay now. It isn't the same. Around 1995-2005 began an era that is unique in history, where MOST people have a computer, and MOST people can access the Internet. Where it went from an obscure hobby for nerds, to being a major part of how housewives live their normal lives. And that isn't even covering "the cell phone" which came to rise in the same era.

Yes, computers will get faster, and they look back at our i5-2500k CPUs and laugh, but it isn't about speed, it is about society and how we do every day things. Not just computers, but cheap, powerful HOME and BUSINESS computers (and now phones) plus cheap Internet access combined, changed the way we do business, entertainment, the way we do everything. Even porn. Those kind of changes don't come along every 10 years. To find another "product" that literally changed everything, you have to go back to the TV, then Radio, and perhaps the refrigerator (yes, the frig, which jumped up life expectancy dramatically). It might be 10 years, or 50 years before something comes along that changes everything again, until then, we are just improving what we have. Adding color to TVs, FM to radios. Ice makers to refrigerators. Right now, Facebook, iPads, and supersmart phones are just extensions of this ongoing era that began at the lucky intersection when computer speed met the availability of the Internet for the public.

Re:Ignorant bliss

[Marxist Hacker 42]

What gets me though is that the modern operating systems are so complex, and multitask so much stuff, that they make a 2Ghz Atom Processor feel *SLOWER* than a 16Mhz 286.

Re:Ignorant bliss

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Heck, somebody who is 40 today can't even look forward to working at the same company 3 years from now. You're the last generation for a lot of stuff.

Re:Ignorant bliss

[noobermin]

Some who actually is sane and rather intelligent. I'd befriend you somehow because such thinkers are blessings to the world.

Re:Ignorant bliss

[mattack2]

Back in 1993, no one knew what email was except those of us that ran a FidoNet link.

Uhh, or at least those of us who used the Internet at college. I used email at least 5 years before 1993 (and yes, someone else is probably going to reply saying they used it even earlier). I may have even used it on BBSes before that, but if so, that was arguably closer to 'private messages' than email (my distinction is largely that one is limited to a certain site, one is potentially between separate nodes).

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[ZombieBraintrust]

I had the worst luck with windows os's. I purchased both a Windows Me, and a Windows Vista machine.

Potential for FreeDOS....

[unixisc]

I have some suggestions where FreeDOS should be tried:

1. Make it 64-bit and run port it to some 64-bit CPUs, including OpenRISC
2. Port it to and run it on Raspberry Pi

Aside from that, it would also be a good idea to have something like Free OS/2 - or work on the OSFree project and ReactOS. Let's have more FOSS versions of OS/2 and NT equivalents, and port them to as many CPU platforms as possible - both current & legacy.

Re:Potential for FreeDOS....

[omnichad]

And what would the point be if there's no executables to run under it?

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[thsths]

> The NT line always had DOS emulation.

It is called the command shell (and a terminal box, but that is a separate issue), and it is not meant to be DOS. As fas as I know it is not even using the 16bit subsystem anymore.

Just because it looks like DOS most people assume it should be DOS.

Re:couchslug the douchebag runs?

[couchslug]

Hello Anonymous APK.

Your responses are so predictable, which is why I leave them for readers to judge and laugh at if they see fit.

I'm not sexconker, BTW. One nick is sufficient.

Hey, maybe you are the person to ask this

[The Creator]

What is the difference between COM and EXE anyway?

Re:Hey, maybe you are the person to ask this

[Opyros]

IIRC it was a matter of whether the executable was compiled using the "tiny" memory model or any other; COM programs were the ones compiled using "tiny". Table 7-1 on this page seems to confirm my recollection.

Re:Hey, maybe you are the person to ask this

[RoverDaddy]

To provide more detail, a COM program was literally 'what's in the file is what you get'. The entire COM program was loaded into memory at offset 100H from the start of a segment, byte for byte with no 'fixups'. I believe those 100H bytes were available for your program to use as scratch RAM, but you could use INT 21 calls to request more memory from DOS. DOS would load the COM file and then jump to the very first instruction at offset 100H.

This is consistent with my understanding of 'tiny' model in that there's only one segment, CS, DS and ES are all expected to point to the same place at program start, and addressing is generally 16-bit.

An EXE file on the other hand was not 'pure code'. It had a header that specified -stuff I don't know anymore if I ever did-, allowing things such as multiple segments and data regions that are specified by size vs. actually filling up a file with zero bytes. Various memory models ('near' and 'far' pointers for instance) were supported.

QEMM and Desqview!

[Arker]

Desqview/X is now the product that needs a free clone.

With that, and some porting work on application libraries, this could really be a powerful alternative free platform. It used to be that linux-based systems filled that role but the requirements on those have bloated tremendously. It would have the advantages of a horde of abandonware that works fine and a very low overhead environment ideal to run stuff like qt-framebuffer as well as playing very nicely in emulation - or running on the most minimal of bare hardware.
   

If Woz ain't rolling now, he never will be...

[Dogtanian]

If Woz wuz dead (sorry woz, I know your out there), he'd be rolling already.

Except that he's not dead. Yeah, I know you just said that, but despite not agreeing with everything "his" company does, he's not exactly vehemently complaining about them either.

Which is (or might not be) odd considering that what Apple is nowadays pretty much represents the complete and utter antithesis of the hacker ethic (*) and the scene that Woz came out of in the mid-70s- the same scene that ultimately nurtured the creation of the Apple II.

(Even if, ironically, the Apple II itself was one of the first consumer-friendly microcomputers and step away from those early origins!)

Of course, Apple had already moved away from that by the time the (Jobs-driven) Mac was coming out, and indeed, the original Mac already demonstrated Apple's (Jobs-driven!) control freakery and closed nature with its lack of expansion and Jobs' insistence that its 128K not be expandable, despite it being generally accepted by the designers that this was inadequate.

But this controlling, closed nature only really became an issue recently, when the iPhone snuck a walled-garden approach to computing in under the guise of being a phone (**), even though it was basically a portable computer. Their success and dominance, combined with being a demonstration that consumers would tolerate a closed ecosystem has made this an issue for the future direction of the computer market.

But I don't see any rolling from the undead Woz...

(*) Yes, one *could* make a case that this was A Good Thing. But it doesn't change the fact that- good or bad- Apple's current direction pretty much is the complete opposite of the hacker philosophy.

(**) The "phone" tag reflects the direction it came from- i.e. building on the existing phone market- rather than what it is. If 90s/early-2000s style PDAs hadn't gone out of fashion, they probably would have evolved into something similar, albeit from a different direction. That's why I find it silly- but understandable- when people say they don't need a "phone" with all that stuff; well, fair enough, but the iPhone and Android siblings aren't meant to be *just* phones, and no-one is buying them merely for that reason- if they were called "portable computers", "communications PDAs" or whatever, the complainers wouldn't be arguing that.

Re:If Woz ain't rolling now, he never will be...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

The problem with the hacker mindset is that things will be half broken, priorities dangling and loose threads everywhere.

This is not what non hackers want. It's not that the lack of expansion or locked down app sources are some anti-hacker conspiracy, it's what consumers ultimately want.

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[Khyber]

"piss poor drivers."

More like piss-poor OS driver subsystem. Trying to mix VXD with DLL, wut?

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[TheRealMindChild]

Yes sir. You pretty much hit the nail on the proverbial head. Thank you.

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[vux984]

Your thesis is based on a reproducible bug in Win98? So they fixed one admittedly significant bug, big deal.

All I have to do to rebutt it is find a single similiarly reproducible bug in ME that didn't affect Win98SE?

Seriously? I could do that, but it would be completely meaningless...

Windows ME supported UPnP which was more of a mess than anything else especially then. Image Preview could crash the system on bad images. It was also the first iteration of system restore which didn't work well and consumed then-limited disk space like it was going out of style.

The new powermanagement features were unreliable.

The new multimedia features were buggy as all get out.

Windows Me wasn't supported on a domain, where Windows 98 was.

They also removed the Personal Web server which was used by a ton of people at the time with microsoft frontpage.

Not to mention that it did not work with a lot of older DOS games due to the removal of real mode DOS support.

I actually use win98se VMs somewhat regularly; and I don't have crashing issues. Its honestly never occurred to me to setup a Windows ME VM for those situations... and even thinking about it now makes we wonder why I ever would.

Almost NOTHING was ever truly supported on ME. There was a bunch of stuff that was supported on Win98, and it usually but not always worked in ME, but that really isn't quite the same thing.

ME had Windows 2000's networking stack plugged into Windows 98's kernel... it was the ultimate bastard operating system.

To the contrary

[Arker]

If you come up with something useful on freedos you can distribute it not only across freedos systems, which will run useful programs with more modest system specs, but you can also distribute it across any more 'modern' platform that has v86 emulator support. So that's pretty much everywhere.

Re:To the contrary

[Grishnakh]

A freeDOS application isn't going to be very useful to many people.

If I write a Linux application that turns out to be useful and I put it up for free download, anyone with a Linux system can easily download it and run it on their computer (even better if I get it included in mainstream repositories). Obviously, it's not the majority of PC users, but it's still millions of people, maybe more since no one really knows how many Linux users there are out there. Running my little program would be simple for them: "sudo apt-get install grishprog", then "grishprog" from the command line would do it. They don't have to stop what they're doing (just have to put it on hold); they can leave their browser windows open, leave their LibreOffice documents open, etc., try out my program, and if they don't like it, they can close it and type "sudo apt-get purge grishprog" to get rid of it.

Depending on how I write this application, it might not be very hard to port to Windows either, such as if I use the Qt toolkit. This will get me a much larger potential userbase, who again (while not quite as easy as the Linux version with apt-get) can fairly easily install the app with a few clicks and try it out without messing up their work flow.

If I write it instead as a FreeDOS application, this is all very different. Now someone has to download it along with a copy of FreeDOS itself (which might be easy enough to package with my program), somehow create a boot disk on either a CD/DVD-R or a USB thumb drive (since no one has floppies any more), then shut down their computer and everything they're currently doing, reboot with this new disk, and use the program, and while they're trying out the program, they can't check their email for important messages, look up something on Google, etc. It's right back to the bad old days of DOS where you can only do one thing at a time. People lined up overnight in 1995 for Windows 95 for a reason (even though it turned out to be a crashy piece of crap, but they didn't know that before they bought it).

And asking people to set up an x86 emulator/VM just to run a program seems rather silly too. People will do it for something they really want or need to use, like if they're a Linux user who really wants/needs to run AutoCAD, Photoshop, or some other business-critical Windows-only application. They're not going to mess around with it for some random program from the internet.

Re:To the contrary

[Arker]

No, if you are packaging it for linux windows or osx you would just package it for an emulator. Then it would multitask nicely with the rest of your existing system.

Plus if you *are* actually running it on bare os, that doesnt mean no multitasking. People forget but DOS multitasked just fine, 'services' when necessary were implemented as TSRs and we had a very nice task-and-window manager called Desqview/X, which included a usable X-server for running remote *nix apps. So it's far from impossible to do that.

Re:helps boot stubborn thin clients

[evilviper]

But they will boot GRUB in a FREEDOS partition.

Are we talking GRUB4DOS, like syslinux, which only needs a tiny FAT partition, which could be created with anything (including Linux) and doesn't need anything else from FreeDOS at all? Not exactly a shining example, particularly since other DOS clones are free, just not GPLd.

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[Targon]

The real problem with ME wasn't about DOS, or a lack of DOS, or anything like that, it was the whole "plug and play" layer being so broken that you could make the system unstable by adding a new card to the system, and even removing it wouldn't get you back. The way ME tried to interface with motherboard resources failed miserably.

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[drsmithy]

One of the reasons Windows ME had such stability issues was because they removed DOS from it and replaced it with an emulator. While Windows 95 and 98 were essentially the Windows GUI on top of glorified DOS internals, Windows ME was an attempt to move away from DOS entirely while keeping the GUI. The intention was to ultimately elimiate the legacy DOS internals outright.

As of Windows 3.0, much of the DOS functionality was replaced by Windows (once it loaded). This increased more in 3.1[1], and by the time of Windows 9x/Me, DOS was basically a bootloader and 16-bit compatibility shim, with essentially all "real" OS functionality in Windows. There's bugger all architectural difference between Windows 95 and Windows Me.

But this failed miserably. This failure resulted in their subsequent low-cost home OS, XP Home, to be based on the NT line instead of the DOS/9x line. If ME had been successful, the Windows home line might still have been 9x-based possibly until SP2 or Vista/7, when security started becoming a visibly major issue.

No, it wouldn't. The idea that there was any desire in Microsoft to keep DOS-based Windows alive for longer than absolutely necessary is laughable. Everyone recognised the limitations imposed by the DOS legacy, and no-one wanted to be constrained by them. Most people were amazed Windows Me was released (though the rationale probably was: if you've spent money on an insurance policy, you may as well cash in on it).

After the IBM/Microsoft "divorce", brought on by the unexpected success of Windows 3.0, the plan was for Windows 95 (nee: 4.0) to be the end of the DOS-based Windows line, replaced by NT-based Windows (as a 0.1 update to NT 4.0, eventually realised as a .1 update to Windows 2000 - XP) in the mid-'90s (keeping in mind Windows 95 was a good 12-18 months late, itself requiring an interim release of Windows 3.11 (incorporating some of the Windows 95 development work) to bridge that gap). Windows 98 was filler product released because of delays in the Windows NT development process meant that consumer hardware capabilities (particularly USB and larger hard disks) were outpacing the capabilities of the retail-channel Windows 95. Hence the reason Windows 98 offers little over the last OEM releases (OSR2.5) of Windows 95 (+IE4) and Windows Me (really just a last squeeze of the teat) relatively even less.

_Before_ "divorce", the "original" original plan was for the OS/2 2.x line (developed mostly by IBM, later to become "Warp", then eComStation) to replace DOS-based Windows for consumer computers and the new-from-scratch OS/2 "NT" (developed solely by Microsoft, renamed after the split as Windows NT, for obvious reasons) to become the "professional" grade OS for business computers.

app store Re:A new OS?! This changes everything!

[Fubari]

Here's one (but I can't figure out how to register my credit card...)

Does it have an app store?

Re:helps boot stubborn thin clients

[rubycodez]

no, we're talking about genuine full frontal nudity GRUB, with menu.lst, stage1, stage2 and fat_stage_1_5 in a c:/boot/grub file. FreeDOS gives a place to land and edit the menu.lst without invoking other operation systems, and do thin client bios updates and flashes.

Re:Windows ME did not have DOS.

[shutdown -p now]

NT has both - there's command line (aka "console subsystem") which is still fully Win32 with no emulation involved; and then there's the actual DOS emulator, NTVDM (Virtual DOS Machine). The latter is present in all 32-bit OSes of the NT family, at least as of Win7.

Re:helps boot stubborn thin clients

[evilviper]

FreeDOS gives a place to land and edit the menu.lst without invoking other operation systems, and do thin client bios updates and flashes.

I fail to see how editing grub's config in a minimal environment where you can't access what it's booting is useful in any way, as grub has it's own full command-line editing.

And if you need to boot-up to DOS for firmware, I'm not seeing how your method is any better than memdisk or similar methods.

I was wrong in assuming you were using grub4dos, but now it really sounds like I might have been giving you too much credit, and what you are doing sounds like it's based on ignorance of better methods, rather than necessity or some really clever design or even a hack. Not that I want to be judgemental, your menthod obviously works, and will up until you hit file system limits or start chafing against some of the other restrictions, but clearly freedos still isn't actually ncessary in your example, except for the firmware updates part, which thousands of others already mentioned as pretty much it's sole remaining niche (and I say this as a long time DOS devotee who has a 286 in good working order that was getting use until about 5 years ago).