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23 Years Of The Open Source 'FreeDOS' Project (linuxjournal.com)
Jim Hall is celebrating the 23rd birthday of the FreeDOS Project, calling it "a major milestone for any free software or open-source software project," and remembering how it all started. An anonymous reader quotes Linux Journal:
If you remember Windows 3.1 at the time, it was a pretty rough environment. I didn't like that you could interact with Windows only via a mouse; there was no command line. I preferred working at the command line. So I was understandably distressed in 1994 when I read via various tech magazines that Microsoft planned to eliminate MS-DOS with the next version of Windows. I decided that if the next evolution of Windows was going to be anything like Windows 3.1, I wanted nothing to do with it... I decided to create my own version of DOS. And on June 29, 1994, I posted an announcement to a discussion group... Our "PD-DOS" project (for "Public Domain DOS") quickly grew into FreeDOS. And 23 years later, FreeDOS is still going strong! Today, many people around the world install FreeDOS to play classic DOS games, run legacy business software or develop embedded systems...
FreeDOS has become a modern DOS, due to the large number of developers that continue to work on it. You can download the FreeDOS 1.2 distribution and immediately start coding in C, Assembly, Pascal, BASIC or a number of other software development languages. The standard FreeDOS editor is quite nice, or you can select from more than 15 different editors, all included in the distribution. You can browse websites with the Dillo graphical web browser, or do it "old school" via the Lynx text-mode web browser. And for those who just want to play some great DOS games, you can try adventure games like Nethack or Beyond the Titanic, arcade games like Wing and Paku Paku, flight simulators, card games and a bunch of other genres of DOS games.
On his "Open Source Software and Usability" blog, Jim says he's been involved with open source software "since before anyone coined the term 'open source'," and first installed Linux on his home PC in 1993. Over on the project's blog, he's also sharing appreciative stories from FreeDOS users and from people involved with maintaining it (including memories of early 1980s computers like the Sinclair ZX80, the Atari 800XL and the Coleco Adam). Any Slashdot readers have their own fond memories to share?
FreeDOS has become a modern DOS, due to the large number of developers that continue to work on it. You can download the FreeDOS 1.2 distribution and immediately start coding in C, Assembly, Pascal, BASIC or a number of other software development languages. The standard FreeDOS editor is quite nice, or you can select from more than 15 different editors, all included in the distribution. You can browse websites with the Dillo graphical web browser, or do it "old school" via the Lynx text-mode web browser. And for those who just want to play some great DOS games, you can try adventure games like Nethack or Beyond the Titanic, arcade games like Wing and Paku Paku, flight simulators, card games and a bunch of other genres of DOS games.
On his "Open Source Software and Usability" blog, Jim says he's been involved with open source software "since before anyone coined the term 'open source'," and first installed Linux on his home PC in 1993. Over on the project's blog, he's also sharing appreciative stories from FreeDOS users and from people involved with maintaining it (including memories of early 1980s computers like the Sinclair ZX80, the Atari 800XL and the Coleco Adam). Any Slashdot readers have their own fond memories to share?
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
RUNDOS.RUN
8.3 character filenames
CON, COM, LPT "files"
EMM386.EXE and HIMEM.SYS, trying to get the "right" mix of EMS, XMS and Conventional memory for games.
Using dos "edit" or qbasic.exe for editing and running basic programs.
QuickBasic 4.5
Dos "Extenders" and 32-bit "flat" mode.
SMARTDRV.EXE to cache my drives.
"VESA" bios "extensions"...
setting the "BLASTER" environment variable "A220 I5 D1 T1"
Using the crappy "dblspace" program.. nothing but a fancy wrapper for pkzip
pkzip. lha, arj, unarj...
zmodem...
chkdsk, fdisk, and good old "format c:"
master, slave, 40 vs 80 pin IDE cables.
HD vs SD floppy disks.
ZIP drives, parallel ports, "real" serial ports, RS-232 electrical signalling levels
null modem cables
IPX/SPX network drives
10BaseT, CoAX networking, with terminators.
DesQview
Mouse Drivers, different ones for every mouse protocol out there.
MS-DOS "Executive"
And now, with a Raspberry Pi, or any "crap" PC that I find, I can run anything, with out worrying about memory limits, XMS, EMS, Conventional memory, extenders, IRQ's DMAs, Ports,
I do miss some things:
-5 second reboots
-no firmware updates for everything
-bare-metal programming
-Knowing all the hardware in my PC, no EFI, or Hidden Intel-ME firmware
Free DOS has been a savior when you need a BIOS update and the vendor only gives an image loaded with some DOS executable.
If you were writing software that you wanted to distribute DOS with, such as games to be run on emulators, you can say do so with FreeDOS, whereas distributing with a version of MS-DOS could still get you in hot water. I've seen it running on embedded equipment for that very reason.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The first time I networked two of my own computers together it was from FreeDOS to Linux. It had to have been around 1997. I couldn't afford network cards, so I got a null-parallel cable, and connected them using PLIP (Parallel Line Internet Protocol) (like SLIP, but a byte at a time instead of a bit). The Linux machine then acted as a gateway connecting to the Internet using a modem and PPP. I was impressed that I had a TCP/IP stack in DOS.
PLIP was pretty quick at copying files between the two machines, much faster than my Internet connection.
Back in the mid-1990s, I bought my first PC. My friend (who lived across the country then) and I discovered "Doom" and the joy of death-matching each other directly over dial-up modems (at about $10 an hour of long-distance phone charges, if I recall).
.. So we had to manually restore the files one by one over the phone per my instructions. Idiot.
We used to share new maps with via floppy disk through the postal mail. Being a programmer, I studied DOS and wrote a computer "cold" that infected his PC (via DOS batch files) when he installed one of the maps I sent so that it would lock up his computer on his birthday, displaying a "Happy birthday!" message.
Weeks later, he calls me at three in the morning demanding I restore his computer to functionality. I told him to take that map disk and run the fixer tool that I put on there. He had already missed placed it in his sloppy apartment..