Story 2014-07-15 3QR Still here and still important: FreeDOS and its loyal supporters

Still here and still important: FreeDOS and its loyal supporters

by
in hardware on (#3QR)
story imageWho cares that it's 20 years old: FreeDOS is still around, fulfilling an interesting and valuable role in the world of tech, and what's more, is ardently supported and appreciated by a loyal core of users and developers. Sean Gallagher over at Ars Technica interviews the FreeDOS lead developer, Jim Hall, to find out why FreeDOS still fills a niche:
Because FreeDOS is, as some have called it, "barely an operating system," it allows developers to get very, very close to the hardware. Most modern operating systems have been built specifically to avoid this for security and stability reasons. But FreeDOS has become much more friendly to virtualization and hardware emulation-it's even the heart of the DOSEMU emulator

The direction the project has taken hasn't exactly followed the road map Hall envisioned after version 1.0. He once had ambitious plans for a next-generation of DOS, originally envisioning a modern FreeDOS along the lines of an alternative history of computing. "For a while, I was thinking, 'If MS DOS survived, where would DOS have gone in the last 10 to 15 years?'" Hall said. "I was advocating some sort of multitasking-we could have task switching like what was supported in the 286, where you can put one process to sleep while you do another process. I wanted to have TCP/IP added to kernel."
FreeDOS might hail from the era before networking but it's inherently real-time, provides a great teaching tool that allows you to get close to the bare metal, and remains deliciously uncomplicated. That's also the opinion of Gallagher, who spent a whole day {gasp!} running DOS just to remember what it's like. Now get offa my lawn.
Reply 3 comments

BIOS Updates (Score: 1)

by nightsky30@pipedot.org on 2014-07-15 19:30 (#2GX)

I still use it for Dell BIOS updates on my Linux systems :)

WordPerfect (Score: 2, Interesting)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-07-16 16:17 (#2H8)

I keep meaning to get it running in a VM so I can install an old version of WordPerfect, and enjoy nostalgia for the good old days. I don't think I would want to be glued to a copy of WP anymore (particularly not the new version), but I hate the Microsoft Ribbon interface so passionately I think looking at an old DOS application might actually do me good.

I still remember back in University in '93 though when the computer lab had something like 40 PCs and 15 Macs, and everyone lined up for the Macs to do their papers on. Writing was on the wall for that interface for word processing. Thinking back, the machines must have been like IBM XTs or 286es, and the Macs I remember were Fat Macs or Mac SEs. Good times. I actually wrote papers back then instead of farting around on the Internet.

Re: WordPerfect (Score: 1)

by nightsky30@pipedot.org on 2014-07-17 13:13 (#2HM)

We had the white on blue IBM 386s for keyboarding...man I hated that class. It was so pointless, yet mandatory.