FreeDOS turns 25 years old: An origin story (Opensource.com)

Over on Opensource.com, FreeDOS founder Jim Hall writes about the origin of the MS-DOS replacement on the 25th anniversary of FreeDOS. "While I announced the project as PD-DOS (for "public domain," although the abbreviation was meant to mimic IBM's "PC-DOS"), we soon changed the name to Free-DOS and later FreeDOS.I started working on it right away. First, I shared the utilities I had written to expand the DOS command line. Many of them reproduced MS-DOS features, including CLS, DATE, DEL, FIND, HELP, and MORE. Some added new features to DOS that I borrowed from Unix, such as TEE and TRCH (a simple implementation of Unix's tr). I contributed over a dozen FreeDOS utilitiesBy sharing my utilities, I gave other developers a starting point. And by sharing my source code under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), I implicitly allowed others to add new features and fix bugs."