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How (And Why) FreeDOS Keeps DOS Alive (computerworld.com.au)
FreeDOS was originally created in response to Microsoft's announcement that after Windows 95, DOS would no longer be developed as a standalone operating system, according to a new interview about how (and why) Jim Hall keeps FreeDOS alive. For its newest version, Hall originally imagined "what 'DOS' would be like in 2015 or 2016 if Microsoft hadn't stopped working on MS-DOS in favor of Windows" -- before he decided there's just no such thing as "modern DOS". An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
No major changes are planned in the next version. "The next version of FreeDOS won't be multitasking, it won't be 32-bit, it won't run on ARM," Hall said. "FreeDOS is still intended for Intel and Intel-compatible computers. You should still be able to run FreeDOS on your old 486 or old Pentium PC to play classic DOS games, run legacy business programs, and support embedded development."
By day, Hall is the CIO for a county in Minnesota, and he's also a member of the board of directors for GNOME (and contributes to other open source projects) -- but he still remembers using DOS's built-in BASIC system to write simple computer programs. "Many of us older computer nerds probably used DOS very early, on our first home computer..." he tells ComputerWorld. Even without John Romero's new Doom level, "The popularity of DOS games and DOS shareware applications probably contributes in a big way to FreeDOS's continued success." I'd be curious how many Slashdot readers have some fond memories about downloading DOS shareware applications.
By day, Hall is the CIO for a county in Minnesota, and he's also a member of the board of directors for GNOME (and contributes to other open source projects) -- but he still remembers using DOS's built-in BASIC system to write simple computer programs. "Many of us older computer nerds probably used DOS very early, on our first home computer..." he tells ComputerWorld. Even without John Romero's new Doom level, "The popularity of DOS games and DOS shareware applications probably contributes in a big way to FreeDOS's continued success." I'd be curious how many Slashdot readers have some fond memories about downloading DOS shareware applications.
Single user and no security what-so-ever. IBM should have used the 68000 combined with a proper OS.
Single user single tasking was just fine for the day's hardware and the user needs. *nix would just slow the hardware down for no good reason, PCs weren't for remote time sharing use. Plus *nix, and its software "ecosystem" wasn't really a good match for a 16-bit architecture.
Yes, the 68K was a much nicer processor. The segmented memory models of the x86 were a major source of bugs. 32-bit registers would have been nice.
MS and IBM had a proper OS for the hardware of that era, it was 16-bit OS/2. The market said no thank you.
Yes, GW-BASIC.
I still use FreeDOS regularly to run 20 year old research software. I use DOSEMU, which lets me edit files and move data around in Linux, and then read them into the DOS program without stopping and starting a virtual machine. So I have a DOSEMU terminal open, and my favorite text editor next to it, and maybe tail the log file in another terminal, all at the same time.
That old DOS software is still superior to any new point-and-click software. The config files leave a precise record of what parameters I set, and the logs leave a precise record of the result. It's fully auditable and reproducible, which is what science should be. And it will still run just as well as the day it was bought in another 20 years from now. The director tried to get us to buy some 'modern' software to do the same task. It 'only' cost $5000 and ran in MS Access. He was surprised when I refused the offer. Does it leave a written record of what I did? No. Are the results reproducible? No. Will it still run in 20 years time? Fuck no. Some things aren't broken yet, leave them alone.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
Yeah, the problem is that the Internet is dominated by the voices of the PC generation, who somehow never learned that there actually was a long history of computing before the PC and MS-DOS.
CP/M and other precursor OSes are really only of interest to historians and nostalgic geeks, but DOS actually has some real relevance to many people and projects even today, thanks to FreeDOS and the fact that we're still running x86-compatible machines... which is sort of astounding, actually.
Sure, there was a long history of computing before the PC and MS-DOS, but it was constrained to very few people for the most part - specialists, hobbyists, professionals, academics, and so on. But it was really the PC, running MS-DOS for the most part, when the vast majority of people were introduced to computers for the first time. So, it's not all that surprising that DOS is seen - rightly, I think - as the OS most used at the beginning of the personal computer revolution.
Even so, I don't think that many people mistake that for the beginning of computing in general. If nothing else, they saw computers on TV, with walls of reel-to-reel tapes and flashing lights.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The number of older CNC machines I have kept running because of Freedos is huge. I have made a shto-ton of cash on smaller machine shops where "professional" IT companies have told them that they cannot fix the control system for their CNC machines.
I come in at $95 an hour and make it work again, custom is elated and trash talks the "professional" company that said it was impossible, I get more calls to fix more from other companies they spread the world on... Rinse and Repeat.
This was 10 years ago when I was almost doing 2-3 CNC repair jobs a week. Now it's maybe one every 2 months, and I don't even do IT professionally anymore.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
(Jim Hall here, from the article.)
This is exactly why we decided a "modern" DOS wasn't really DOS anymore. As you say, OS/2 was intended to be the "modern" DOS of the day, a multitasking, protected mode operating system. But to get all that, you have to break binary compatibility. So OS/2 wasn't really DOS anymore. But it wasn't meant to be, hence the new name.
Ultimately, we decided that if you can't run classic DOS programs on a "modern" DOS, then it's not DOS anymore. So we decided to keep FreeDOS as just plain DOS. That's why FreeDOS 1.2 and later will still be essentially the same as FreeDOS 1.1 and earlier, with a few updates here and there. No fundamental changes. We won't be multitasking or multiuser or any other "modern" operating system functionality. That's not what it means to be DOS.