FreeDOS Turns 15 Years Old Today 124
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the keeps-on-ticking dept.
from the keeps-on-ticking dept.
Jim Hall writes "The FreeDOS Project turns 15 years old today! PD-DOS (later, 'FreeDOS') was announced to the world on June 28 1994 as a free replacement for MS-DOS, which Microsoft had announced would go away the following year, with the next release of Windows. There's more history available at the FreeDOS 'About' page and my blog. Today, FreeDOS is used by people all around the world. You can find FreeDOS in many different places: emulators, playing old DOS games, business, ... even bundled with laptops and netbooks. FreeDOS is still under active development, and recently released a new version of its kernel. A 'FreeDOS 1.1' distribution is planned."
Re:In case anyone is puzzled as I was (Score:2, Interesting)
1. and 2. are easily taken care of by DOSBox. 3. is a valid point, but really only when you're talking about legacy DOS-based systems; otherwise, modern OSes are a better choice (and I've seen a surprising number of cash registers with Tux mascots on their screens, so Linux seems to be quite popular there).
Of course, there's a 4. - putting older computers (especially pre-80386 PCs) to good use.
Re:Start FreeWindows7 emulator now (Score:5, Interesting)
You can find such a project here: http://www.reactos.org/ [reactos.org]
As far as I can see, Microsoft's track record at supporting legacy software is better than most.
Bios Upgrades (Score:2, Interesting)
The one requirement I have for DOS is to do bios upgrades to older laptops which still requiring booting to dos. This seems to be one use case which I didn't have much luck with FreeDOS. Is that intentional part of the design (perhaps freedos protects the bios?) or was it just an incompatibility of the bios upgrade tool I have?
Re:In case anyone is puzzled as I was (Score:3, Interesting)
Good Business Intro to Free Software (Score:5, Interesting)
Years ago I used FreeDOS to make dedicated hardware test stations. These were super cheap boxes with text only displays, an ISA extender card for the DUT, and a floppy. FreeDOS was a great way to use our existing DOS test code on the cheap. We had a floppy for each product type. Boot off the floppy, insert a card to test, hit one key and get an easy pass/fail indication. We had total control and the price was right.
In the age of PCI/PCIe I now do the same thing using Linux and a CD-ROM. You have a wealth of development tools, support for modern bus types and larger address space, and still no expensive per box software license.
FreeDOS is indispensible when you need it! (Score:3, Interesting)
And frankly, I also love this:
http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/modboot/ [nu2.nu]
I would love to see someone take up development of this and to update the network drivers collection and the like. There are still times when a tech needs DOS if for no other reason than to flash a BIOS or to run Ghost over the network or with a local USB storage device.
Re:What is this "DOS" of which you speak? (Score:3, Interesting)
FreeDOS was a decent idea at the time (pre-Windows 95). I suspect that it still serves- or could serve- a useful purpose for a small proportion of users running legacy software/hardware setups. That's probably a notable amount of people in absolute terms, but small compared to the total computer market.
But it's incredibly unlikely that the vast majority of modern users would consider an MS-DOS workalike an acceptable substitute for Windows. As the guy says, FreeDOS's inclusion in those cases is a technicality, nothing more.
Usefullness of old DOS (Score:5, Interesting)
I like to tinker... For some of this, FreeDOS is a ideal solution: I recently bought a box of old thin clients. They're all VIA x86 based with flash drive on CF cards. They all have serial ports, legacy parallel ports, USB and ethernet. They are small, don't draw much power, and are only like $15 each when you're willing to buy more than 5 at a time. That's cheaper than any dev kit based on any embedded processor that I know of, and certainly cheaper than using a dedicated PC.
Free-DOS is perfect for these... with an old DOS C compiler you can quickly whip up small programs that can do all kinds of things (Think parallel port = 8 bit DIO with dedicated control channels). If the job gets too big for FreeDOS to handle, I punt and install linux; but, for most simple things, DOS is really all you need.
I could write code to run on a microcontroller like a PIC or ARM, or anything in between. I could also write the code in LabView or a Microsoft .NET language to run on a PC. Why go to all the trouble and expense?