How (And Why) FreeDOS Keeps DOS Alive (computerworld.com.au) 211
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.
There was a modern MS DOS ... (Score:5, Informative)
... before he decided there's just no such thing as "modern DOS" ...
Well, there was a "modern MS DOS", it was MS OS/2 1.x.
Re:There was a modern MS DOS ... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, there was a "modern MS DOS", it was MS OS/2 1.x.
Except that OS/2 was a multitasking, protected mode operating system ...
That was part of what made it "modern".
... from IBM ...
And from Microsoft
... and MS-DOS wasn't any of those things.
OS/2 1.x was described by Microsoft as a modern OS designed to replace DOS.
OS/2 1.1, released just 11 months later, came with the promised Presentation Manager GUI, further extending its abilities beyond MS-DOS.
Extending its abilities, also known as "modernizing". According to Microsoft OS/2 1.x with Presentation Manager was the "upgrade path" from DOS. For users stuck with legacy software they were going to add a comparable GUI to DOS called Windows. The Windows and Presentation Manager APIs were nearly identical, a convenience for developers as described by Microsoft. Windows was just temporary. Then the market ignored OS/2 1.x and stayed with DOS, Microsoft then reconsidered Windows and their partnership with IBM. I think we know how the story goes from there. The fact remains, for a little while, OS/2 1.x was the modern OS to replace DOS according to Microsoft.
Re:There was a modern MS DOS ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows had already been available for nearly three years before Presentation Manager was released with OS/2 1.1, and was introduced only three months after the OS/2 development agreement between MS and IBM was signed. At the time the agreement was signed, Windows had already been in development for about a year as a response to other PC-based UI products, and of course the Lisa/Macintosh. The PM API was designed to be similar to the Windows API, not the other way around, and still had some substantial differences. Interestingly, the original 1985 HELLO sample program that Charles Petzold based his famous "Hello World" example on will still compile and run almost unmodified under Windows 10, with the needed modifications mostly being limited to variable types that have since changed.
Having similar APIs was helpful, but they were different enough to make a common code base impractical.
Re: (Score:3)
According to Microsoft OS/2 1.x with Presentation Manager was the "upgrade path" from DOS. For users stuck with legacy software they were going to add a comparable GUI to DOS called Windows. Windows had already been available for nearly three years before Presentation Manager was released with OS/2 1.1, and was introduced only three months after the OS/2 development agreement between MS and IBM was signed.
None of that changes the fact that Microsoft was telling developers, including me, that OS/2 was the upgrade path from DOS and the Windows was a temporary thing for people with legacy hardware/software and that migrating them to OS/2 with Presentation Manager would be easy since porting your apps would be easy, Windows and Presentation Manager having a nearly identical API. As I said there was a window of time where Microsoft was telling people OS/2 was the replacement for DOS, Presentation Manager the repl
Re:There was a modern MS DOS ... (Score:5, Informative)
(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.
Re: (Score:3)
Keep the software functionality; it's perfect for specific circumstances. Please try to modernize the hardware interface as much as possible. A lot of contemporary computers lack what was considered basic hardware when DOS was new (and gained new stuff).
Re:There was a modern MS DOS ... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh
Re:There was a modern MS DOS ... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh ... and damn you ;-) ... you are the main reason my better DOS and BIOS books, and the Pentium MMX 166, survive garage cleanings and take up valuable space.
Mwahahahaha! Victory is mine!
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Before OS/2, there was multitasking DOS v4, http://www.os2museum.com/wp/mu... [os2museum.com] which was the direction that MS was taking DOS before branching out to what eventually became OS/2, http://www.os2museum.com/wp/be... [os2museum.com]
There was also the family mode programs that ran on simple DOS and OS/2 v1 (as well as NT up to Win2k using the OS/2 sub-system) where the program basically had a minimal OS/2 environment grafted on. The text mode Word v5 is a good example.
DOS shareware games (Score:5, Funny)
I remember some of the really early DOS games that were written to basically run correctly and be playable on (IIRC) a 4.77MHz 8086/8088.
Then I remember trying to play those same games on a (again, IIRC) 12MHz 80286 system. That lunar lander would just immediately plummet into the ground or crash into the side of a mountain, and try as I might - there was nothing I could do about it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There were TSR utilities that basically wasted CPU cycles so you could play games like that. Centipede was another unplayable game unless you slowed it down.
Re:DOS shareware games (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, I remember having to write a TSR myself that would count from 1 to 100,000 or something like that at every tick of an interrupt just so Prince of Persia would play at an acceptable speed on my 386 DX2 66 when it was optimised for a 286.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would something that slowed things down be called 'Turbo?'
Maybe games needed a "Torpid" button instead...
I remember the Turbo button too; but, as you said, it didn't seem to slow things down enough.
You're not that old (Score:4, Informative)
"Many of us older computer nerds probably used DOS very early, on our first home computer..."
And here I think of DOS as a 'newer' system
Re: (Score:2)
"Many of us older computer nerds probably used DOS very early, on our first home computer..."
And here I think of DOS as a 'newer' system
Well, I was using TRS-80 DOS and L-DOS on TRS-80's in the very early 80's. But that was at school. My first home computer was a C64 with a cassette drive.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Heck, most of them would be surprised if you told them DOS was a bad rip-off of an existing system to start with.
Re:You're not that old (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
I think you're right, but I think you have to label DOS generically as loads of people were first exposed to other DOS systems, like Apple ][ DOS 3.3 and the various other DOS-alike command line interpreters for home computers like the Radio Shack Color Computer, C64, and so on.
The IBM PC was expensive and many schools had Apple ][s and a lot of home users used ColorComputer and Commodore 64s versus more expensive IBM branded PCs.
I think part of the reason DOS may rightly be seen as "old school" computing
Re:You're not that old (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The interview was about DOS, so I didn't talk about the other stuff before DOS (and after).
Our first "computer" was a mainframe acoustic coupler dial-up terminal my mom brought home for a week, so she could do some work at home. I wasn't very excited about it at the time; it was all business software and I was like eight years old.
I seem to remember we had another computer in the house at one point. Not a TRS-80 but something along those lines.
In 1982, my family bought an Apple clone (Franklin ACE 1000) and that was where my brother and I taught ourselves to write programs in AppleBASIC. I was fascinated by computer interfaces that we saw on TV and in the movies, so I wrote programs that emulated those, including the thermonuclear war simulator from the Wargames(1983) movie.
Some time after that, we bought an IBM (I think the XT). And that's what got me started with MS-DOS.
We used MS-DOS at home (upgrading to the '286 and '386 and '486) until I went to college with the family's old '386. During my university days, I had an account on the VAX and the Unix systems. I discovered Linux, and switched to that on my own computer (dual-boot with MS-DOS). I mostly avoided Windows at home, although I did run Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 for a short time - mostly for games. At work, I ran Apollo AEGIS/DomainOS, HP-UX, AIX, SunOS/Solaris, and Linux (RedHat 3.0.3 and later). Work also put me on a Windows NT4 desktop, which I ran for a while until they let me run Linux at work full-time. In the office, I've run either Windows (whatever was current) or Linux. At home, I just run Linux (I'm running Fedora Linux now) and use DOSemu or QEMU to run FreeDOS.
Re: (Score:2)
CP/M and other precursor OSes are really only of interest to historians and nostalgic geeks,
You can say that about DOS too.
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.
Some, but not "the vast majority". Many people were introduced by pre-DOS computers. Geeks were still buying non-DOS, non-Windows home (and work) computers through all the 1980's, for nearly 10 years after PC-DOS came out. At work as techies we had a mainframe terminal, a PDP-11, and a Commodore PET. We regarded the IBM PC and DOS as for admin people and would not have given a thank you for one. At home I had a CP/M machine and other techies owned BBCs and Ataris, not IBM
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Some, but not "the vast majority". Many people were introduced by pre-DOS computers. Geeks were still buying non-DOS, non-Windows home (and work) computers through all the 1980's, for nearly 10 years after PC-DOS came out.
This is completely accurate. The "personal computer revolution" began ca. 1980, and it wasn't until sometime around 1989 or 1990 that DOS-compatible devices started to dominate the home PC market. For that first decade, DOS-based devices were often primarily for business. I still remember a friend whose dad (worked in some tech-savvy industry) got an IBM-compatible PC that ran DOS at home in 1986 or so... and it was seen by everyone else in the neighborhood as some weird novelty. Everybody else had chea
Re: (Score:2)
You can say that about DOS too.
This is the only point I'll flat out disagree with you on. Even today, there's at least one commercial product I know of sold that make use of FreeDOS to boot into a clean PC environment for some of its operations. It's still a real thing for some people, although an admittedly small group.
No, that's wrong. The personal computer revolution had begun before DOS and in the 1980s was in full swing with or without DOS. There was a wide range of types such as Sinclairs, Commodores, Amigas, Amstrads alongside the IBM/DOS PC in the 1980-95 period. It was standardised on the IBM PC clone only gradually.
When you start getting into subjective territory like this, there will inevitably be disagreement about how you define the "beginning" of the personal computer revolution, I suppose. My guess is many geeks like us will
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Such as IBM offering VM functionality for almost 10 years prior to the PC's introduction.
Re: You're not that old (Score:2)
Hear, hear!
I came to work with MS-DOS after CP/M, which followed VAX-VMS at uni. :-)
#greybeard
Use it via DOSEMU (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Not only that, the logs are in clean 7-bit ASCII instead of some undocumented binary format so that you don't need some special program to read them.
Re: (Score:2)
edit.exe is for spoiled kids. Real {M,Wom}en(TM) used edlin.com!
Well, strictly speaking I hardly ever used edlin, and ed's source code is pretty much "while read x;do echo ?;done", but on a MUD I've coded for over a decade, you could either muck around with FTP (not compatible with any fuse stuff) or use ed. As their ed was vastly improved over both edlin and Unix ed, it was pretty comfortable once you got used to it.
Re: (Score:2)
Eh now there's FTP stuff with fuse. Or Jedit in early 00s to edit files on an ftp (there must be a thousand editors that do this but this one was - is - a desktop java application and thus cross-platform in Windows 9x, XP, Unix)
Re: (Score:2)
Real programmers used COPY CON MYPROGRAM.EXE
I doubt if it's possible to make a legal .exe without nulls, and IIRC "copy con" doesn't allow those. As for .com, try this one: Alt-239 Alt-240 Alt-240 Alt-240 Alt-240.
Re: (Score:2)
DosBox also works on non-x86 hardware. You can run it on any cheap electricity-conserving piece of ARM with more than enough oomph for anything that was written for DOS.
Freedos rocks! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm commenting elsewhere on this article, so I don't have mod points. But if I did, I would mod you up. Thanks.
Re:Freedos rocks! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen similar experiences. It is often cheaper to fix the older CNC equipment than to replace them by hundreds of thousands of dollars. - Even if it happens several times.
Of course once the machine itself starts breaking and costing money , replacing it might be more attractive. But if it is software or computer hardware related, it is a no brain'r to keep it chugging along instead of replacing them.
It was to half-assed to have a future (Score:3)
After all, Microsoft and the DOS community messed up to many points badly. For example the "driver" concept was basically unused. Few people ran ansi.sys because it meant sacrificing a ridiculous amount of RAM. That's why most software had to access the hardware directly, even for primitive things like coloured text.
Also there was the problem of not having a compiler coming with the operating system which meant that there was no free software movement. People actually sent out binary files. So every software was restricted to a narrow band of hardware.
Essentially there is now the need for a "new DOS". It would run on hardware like STM32-class microcontrollers which have (much) less than a megabyte of RAM and no memory management.You'd start off with decent lightweight hardware abstraction, then add a file system as well as simple version of the usual UNIX tools. Once you have an editor and a shell you'll have a decently working system which can be used for all kinds of things.
Re: (Score:2)
I recall plenty of code being printed in magazines - either computing magazines in "learning to program" articles, or in other publications like Dragon Magazine (a few character generators, a map generator, etc). But was it Free ? Probably not, at least by the current definitions. But you had access to the source....
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but only a fraction of people could use those on their PCs, as MS-DOS didn't come with an actual development system. Most people had to get Turbo Pascal or something separately.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I'm half kidding, but magazines used to come with code to use with debug to produce small com utilities.
Re: (Score:2)
You had either basica or gw-basic and debug. What more did you want?
Turbo Pascal was like $400 bucks. I know a few people that had it, but no one that actually paid for it.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, but only a fraction of people could use those on their PCs, as MS-DOS didn't come with an actual development system. Most people had to get Turbo Pascal or something separately.
Don't forget debug.exe :-)
As a student a completed a fairly lengthy (6-month fulltime) programming assignment using only DOS debug.exe on a 386. As I remember it, by the time I was done I had much of a proper OS completed within the program: rudimentary scheduler, index for files (floppies were very very slow), primitives for text-based widgets (writing directly to the frame-buffer) and even a working mouse cursor and left button.
I will seriously consider suicide if I'm ever again forced to use a crippled
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually it did come with Microsoft BASIC... which back at that time was the only development environment Microsoft had made.
Re: (Score:2)
Shareware? Met Justin Boyan summer of '89 at CTY (Score:2)
He wrote a modem program on his dad's computer as a teenager and it was very successful as shareware. The shareware system worked for more than one certain crazy antivirus guy.
Jim Hall (Score:3, Interesting)
I have had the pleasure of corresponding with, and occasionally collaborating with, Jim Hall a few times over the years. He's not just active in the open source community, he's a really nice guy. Easy to work with, friendly and helpful. We've exchanged notes about package management, he's sent some patches to a project I was working on to make it more user-friendly (and DOS compatible). Jim manages to make a technically focused OS while being pleasant to work with. More open source project leaders could learn by his example.
Re: (Score:3)
I have had the pleasure of corresponding with, and occasionally collaborating with, Jim Hall a few times over the years. He's not just active in the open source community, he's a really nice guy. Easy to work with, friendly and helpful. We've exchanged notes about package management, he's sent some patches to a project I was working on to make it more user-friendly (and DOS compatible). Jim manages to make a technically focused OS while being pleasant to work with. More open source project leaders could learn by his example.
This made my day. Thanks, whoever you are!
Corporate? (Score:2)
Sure, the game angle is there, but what I was wondering about is how many people use FreeDOS to keep 20 year old DOS programs running for business and/or government.
Memories (Score:4, Insightful)
I got my engineering degree with DOS. Everyone was issued a Z100 (non msdos!) with an 8088, Fortran and Basic. Some other programs such as CAD, PC-TeX were available. Russ Nelson worked at my college and created Freemacs, the word processor and the spelling checker and many other utilties in use at Clarkson
Some classes gave you a VMS or Unix account. When it was in heavy use at the end of the semester , it was faster to edit in DOS and upload than to scroll down the file in VMS. The DOS FORTRAN didn't have the extensions or libraries. Sometimes its math wasn't as accurate.
After I got a 286 and had gotten a Unix account (w/ Usenet access), I started trying to learn Unix things. Turbo C, GNUish utilities, Freemacs, Elvis and shell clones helped me. Minix was almost as helpful.
A 486 w/ 8mb lead to Linux replacing DOS and work as a Unix sysadmin. The DOS intro to C, awk, vi, lex, yacc (via "The Unix Programming Environment" was extremely helpful. Linux at home helped me continue learning. It could single task better than my Sparcstation 1+ running SunOS.
The 8088, 80286 and 486 systems probably cost ~ $5k each back in the day where a Unix workstation was ~ $20k if you could get one.
I used to run MS DOS 6.2 (Score:5, Funny)
FreeDOS is needed even today, but... (Score:3)
...just for historical reasons.
It is absolutely awesome to have when you simply need to run some old program, which is in my case usually bound to some piece of old, but still useful HW, like chip programmer, some old measurement or CNC equipment etc. Or perhaps for analysis of program behaviour in order to do modern reimplementation. Or to enjoy nostalgia trip with some old DOS game...
WRT to FreeDOs development, I don't think it's needed outside integration into modern OS & HW, like having modern drivers for mouse and optical unit, USB useage for printing, nice, antialiased fonts, good high, EMS etc memory manager etc. I/O virtualisation of some sort would be great, so I can, for example have virtual LPT port that would be seen on desired I/O port address and connected to some real LPT port somewhere entirely else or even to USB driver or some userland program through pipe etc.
I don't think susbtantial, grand scale reworks like 32-bit and 64-bit implementation, multicore and multitasking are neccessary. We have plenty other solutions for that.
i like freedos (Score:3)
BIOS flashing (Score:3)
I just used FreeDOS to update this old Optiplex a month ago. Much thanks to the developers for keeping a still valuable tool available.
Re:DOS was terrible (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Single user and no security what-so-ever. IBM should have used the 68000 combined with a proper OS.
Yeah, that's what I said when the IBM 5150 PC was announced in 1981 with an 8/16-bit 8088 CPU running a rebranded Quick & Dirty Operating System [wikipedia.org]:
"Too little, too late".
I was not aware yet that a brand name may be worth a lot more than technical specifications.
That why it was great. That's the D in DOS (Score:3)
> DOS was terrible. Single user and no security what-so-ever.
Before DOS, there were multi-user network operating systems. Which ran on $100,000 computers. Getting rid of the multi-user and network (and the therefore the need for security) to make a DISK Operating System rather than a network OS allowed to to run on PERSONAL computers. That was awesome. Then the internet happened.
Re: (Score:2)
I have seen some add-on security products for both MS-DOS and early Macs (pre OS X) that were pretty good, and were more than just separating users.
The most notable was a product by Casady & Greene called A. M. E., or Access Managed Environment. It allowed for hierarchal management of users where only the top admins could see peers of each other, and everyone else could only see who was lower in the hierarchy. Each permission had a setting of not just allowing or disallowing, but allowing the downstre
Re:DOS was terrible (Score:5, Informative)
Re: DOS was terrible (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
As I remember, merely inserting the diskette would do absolutely nothing. You had to either run a program from the diskette, or forget to take it out of the drive when you (re)booted the machine in order to actually "catch" anything from it.
Autorun didn't come along until Windows 95.
Maybe they're thinking of the Mac's System software... There were several viruses on the Mac that could be spread just by insertion since the Finder (or System) would load the Desktop file on the disk insert event.
Re: (Score:2)
Merely inserting a diskette could infect your machine.
Inserting a disk into a running machine would do what? You don't even really mount the disk until you try to access it.
There are lots of vulnerabilities if you run insecure programs on it. Trojans, worms, and viruses had different meanings back in the day. They'd all operate differently, but would all require use of an infected (insecure) file. Anti-Virus was all about scanning insecure files you were trying to run. Simply put, if you never ran anything insecure, you never had a problem.
Re:DOS's built-in BASIC system? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, GW-BASIC [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
DOS had a basic interpreter? I don't remember that. In fact I'm pretty sure it didn't.
Then things that you are pretty sure about are sometimes trivially and obviously wrong.
Both the first shareware and one of the first mainstream open source software used it, that being PC-TALK. [wikipedia.org]
But hey... you arent old enough to know any of this, but somehow managed to think that you were knowledgeable.
Re: (Score:2)
QBASIC was in MS-DOS 5 and later, and PC DOS 5.0 throught 5.02.
In MS-DOS, it replaced GW-BASIC; IBM continued to keep their BASICA (which GW-BASIC was functionally equivalent to but did not depend on the Cassette Basic in ROM) around to the end.
Re: (Score:3)
Qbasic was included in Windows 9x and even NT4 apparently. Notably, "Microsoft Edit" was a shim that called qbasic.exe in editor-only mode (it's still better than vi and nano). Qbasic itself allows to play short high pitched tones through the PC speaker to startle people around you, or to annoy them much with a long duration 4KHz for instance.
What's too bad is the keyboard input, unless there's some other way you couldn't really use continuous keyboard input for something like a space invader clone. Everyon
Re: (Score:2)
Oh crap, I had no idea to look for keyboard input there :) .BAS example files/games may have varied between DOS, Windows 95 and 98.
Availability of
So I should have looked for off-line help back then be it a book, people that knew about programming, getting someone to print nibbles.bas.
Yes scrolling like a NES game wasn't something I even considered doable (doing something tiled-based, slow and naive in 40x25 text mode would have been fun already)
Re: (Score:2)
You could sort of do it in EGA mode if you used the PCopy command. My memory is fuzzy on the exact implementation of it but you could draw pictures into one of 8 'pages' of memory and use pcopy to dump that data into an invisible page, then make that page visible... double-buffering I think it was called.
I did a few experiments where some scrolling and even a bit of sprite animation could be done. It didn't have the performance to be mistaken for an NES, but it could have been in the ballpark of Commander
Re:The problem with FreeDOS... (Score:5, Insightful)
Have an old legacy proprietary DOS program that you need for your business? Then throw it into /dev/null, and hire some talented programmers to write a modern free open-source replacement for GNU/Linux, that will get published on github.
Why, that just sounds like an absolutely wonderful idea. Why would anyone insist keeping on using some old software that has been paid for many moons ago, and we all by now know exactly where and when it does and doesn't work because it's been doing the same task for 20 years? Why not instead pay thousands and thousands of dollars for someone to attempt to write a replacement for it, possibly reverse-engineering a proprietary and undocumented hardware interface (costing thousands and thousands of dollars more more in time) only to give it all away to the handful of other people on the planet who also use the same version of WHATEVER.EXE that I'm using?
Yep, what a smashing idea!
Re: (Score:2)
Agree completely. It's much better to wait until your hardware dies, and then let your company go bust as some vital business function cannot be replaced in time.
Re:The problem with FreeDOS... (Score:5, Informative)
Or, you know, use FreeDOS to run it on modern hardware - which is kind-of the point of the article.
Re:The problem with FreeDOS... (Score:5, Informative)
Or just run it in DOSBox on any OS. For most software that's the obvious thing to do.
Re:The problem with FreeDOS... (Score:5, Informative)
Or just run it in DOSBox on any OS. For most software that's the obvious thing to do.
Actually, it's better to run legacy business applications on an actual DOS system like FreeDOS. DOSBox is meant only for games. They don't have great compatibility with business software.
FreeDOS runs very well in PC emulators and virtual machines like QEMU, VirtualPC, VMWare, VirtualBox, and others. At home, I run QEMU and DOSemu to boot FreeDOS. (When I'm developing, I use DOSemu so I can share files easily between Linux and FreeDOS. When I want to test FreeDOS in a more traditional virtual machine, I run QEMU.) It runs great!
Re:The problem with FreeDOS... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't disagree with most of what's posted in this subthread, but I can tell you that DOSBox runs many things well. I've used it to keep Lotus Agenda alive, and to run WordStar, etc., on my Linux systems.
It does lack printing, which is an issue, but there are workarounds that can be automated.
Sure, if you want everything to work pretty much as-is, use FreeDOS[1]. But DOSBox does much more than gaming.
[1] I've found some things don't work on FreeDOS, usually those things that rely heavily on internals of memory or hardware management. For instance the task switcher Back & Forth doesn't work.
Re: (Score:2)
An extended dosbox that contains serial and parallel support.
http://ykhwong.x-y.net/ [x-y.net]
Re:The problem with FreeDOS... (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem I have seen with old programs is data portability. Even several revisions out on the same programs can make it costly. In a lot of situations , more costly than keeping obsolete hardware running.
I was involved in a project to resurrect an old NetWare 3.something system for an accounting program used in a division of a company that was purchased originally as a stand alone company. It was determined years ago that it would be too costly to port the data because it would all need to be input by hand requiring several people and about a year to do so it was never updated to a modern system.
Even after getting it running again, it was still in use in parallel with a dormant version of the company wide system for several years while they had three people pulling and inputting data and validating it before going live.
Once you get out of the update cycle with proprietary software, it can sometimes even become costly to move up. But to switch to another system altogether can be really costly.
Re: (Score:2)
Hire some talented programmers to write a program, and then maintain it forever.
You revile binary compatibility because it's an enabler of proprietary software (most of it freeware written by a single person), the flipside is your stuff stops working after a few years.
Like many here I've eventually abandoned Windows but face it, then the fun is over. Not much to do except spend your time in firefox, bash and vlc.
Re: (Score:2)
And reality, what more do many computer users need to do? A good browser and a format-compatible office suite like OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and maybe a mail client. And quite a few can do without the office suite, or just use google docs.
Re: (Score:3)
For some things, yes. If you need a hard realtime system with sub-microsecond timing requirements and deterministic interrupt handling, Linux isn't going to do it, but DOS will. Even RTLinux couldn't meet those kinds of requirements.
Re: (Score:2)
That'll work only until you actually invoke any feature of DOS. Ie, you're operating on bare metal rather than DOS.
Re: (Score:3)
Practically spea
Re:The problem with FreeDOS... (Score:4, Insightful)
Practically speaking, DOS is so simple that there's not much that it could do that couldn't be easily worked around.
I'd rather say: DOS is so simple it provides nothing that can't be implemented from scratch in less time that it takes to work around its downsides.
The only worthwhile thing it gives you is a filesystem. A filesystem that doesn't work on modern machines (disks above 2GB, GPT partition tables, UEFI, sectors bigger than 512 bytes), gets corrupted on a crash, suffers from a ridiculous level of fragmentation, has bizarre limitations on file names (8.3, all caps, half of ASCII banned), and so on.
I'm not sure what's the modern equivalent of INT 13 (some EFI calls?), but otherwise, writing a simple but adequate filesystem without those flaws is something any half-decent programmer can do in less than a day. Writing filesystems is like writing a compiler: a good optimized one takes a team a decade, something that works can be done really quickly.
I've done so myself (filesystem-in-a-file rather than filesystem-on-sectors, though), with crash resiliency, transactions and zlib compression, although with some other limitations that fit my particular use case. And if you don't want to reinvent the wheel, there should be plenty of code to reuse around.
Re: (Score:3)
All of which are usually not necessary on an embedded system that needs to fly fast and likely doesn't even need a filesystem. The point of my original post wa
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
"Back in the day" things like WordStar, 1-2-3, Agenda, dBase, etc., were considered really great stuff and were used to get a lot of work done. The world has moved on but I believe those "oldies" still can be useful. (There's the famous example of George R R Martin using WordStar apparently to this day.) And nothing much has really replaced Agenda.
FreeDOS (and DOSBox) allow playing the old games, which I think made up for in gameplay what they lacked in graphics (the citation above of MOO is a good example)
Re: (Score:2)
DEVICEHIGH/LOADHIGH, how we loved ye...
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I like to download the iso (something that boots FreeDOS and runs some graphical wizard stuff I'm not interested in), mount the iso, extract the BIOS and flashing program from subdirectories/archive/floppy image, put them on USB and boot MS-DOS 7.10 to run the thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Bloated as hell.
Modern DOS (Score:5, Insightful)
I am seizing Control of this article and asking Hey, Slashdot, if there were a modern DOS, what would it be like?
I know you're posting as an AC so probably won't get seen, but I'll reply anyway because it's an interesting question.
In short, you get Linux.
We discussed this in great depth in various places, and if you try to project a "modern" DOS to today, you end up with a 32-bit multitasking kernel that provides native networking and hardware abstraction. You lose binary compatibility; applications written for the newer "modern" DOS won't run on, say, MS-DOS 6. But that wouldn't be surprising; many programs written for MS-DOS 6 wouldn't run on MS-DOS 3, either. You need to provide some method of forward compatibility, of course. To run a "classic" DOS application on the "modern" DOS would require some kind of emulation environment.
And if you want that, run Linux. Because Linux is a 32-bit multitasking kernel that provides native networking and hardware abstraction. You don't have binary compatibility; applications written for Linux won't run on MS-DOS 6. To run "classic" DOS applications on Linux requires an emulation environment like DOSemu (which requires FreeDOS, by the way).
Once you break binary compatibility, a "modern" DOS isn't really DOS anymore. What's the point in a "modern" DOS if you can't run classic DOS programs on it? Because that's not DOS, it's something else.
Re: (Score:2)
Would a modern DOS be something that runs on top of UEFI, or somehow inside UEFI?
Framebuffer instead of (or in addition to) 80x25, UEFI's mouse instead of DOS mouse driver, etc.
For all I care it could be single tasking with a flat 64bit memory space.
It might run on all supported CPU architectures even.
But you're still stuck with PC speaker and no sound I believe.
FreeDESQView? (Score:2)
I'd think the more "DOS-like" way to multitask would be to launch DESQView from FreeDOS and spawn processes from that. While DESQView can be freely downloaded and passed around, I don't believe Symantec has ever released the source to this bit of Quarterdesk flotsam. Bummer.
Why more "DOS-like"? DESQView sucks up 150KB, plus 30KB per task. IIRC, about the minimum Linux memory overhead from among the low footprint Linux distros is about 7MB, although perhaps one can do better with Linux From Scratch. But then
Re:Downloading DOS shareware (Score:4, Informative)
For shareware we relied on floppy disks and CDs. Most of them came attached to some magazine.
I wonder how many new devs know what "shareware" was? For those wondering: shareware was a concept where devs created something and gave away a limited version of it for free. And you could share that limited version with anyone. Shareware games usually were the first "chapter" or first few levels. Shareware DOS applications usually just nagged you to buy them after 30 days - but I don't remember many that actually stopped working if they weren't registered.
I mentioned some shareware in the interview, but I played a lot of Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, Commander Keen, Rise of the Triad, Epic Pinball, Jill of the Jungle, and Duke Nukem back then. These are all DOS shareware games.
I used a lot of DOS shareware applications for other things. AsEasyAs and GalaxyWrite got me through a lot of my university physics program. I analyzed lab data in AsEasyAs (because the old saying is "as easy as 1-2-3" ... and Lotus 1-2-3 [wikipedia.org] was a popular commercial spreadsheet ... get it?) and wrote class papers in GalaxyWrite (not as powerful as WordPerfect, but great for papers). I also remember a bunch of other DOS shareware applications but can't remember their names anymore: a modem-terminal program, an equation solver, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
The comms program was TELEX.EXE. Now cloned for *nix in minicom. I loved that software. My shell for DOS was Norton Commander (NC.EXE) and still use it to this day when I'm on my DOS box programming old Motorola radios and burning EPROMS.
Re: (Score:2)
The comms program was TELEX.EXE. Now cloned for *nix in minicom. I loved that software.
That was it! I loved Telex too. Great program.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't usually do the "internet pedantry" thing, but I have to correct you to Telix. ;) Only because I still use it pretty often for various geeky things that aren't all that interesting and I have a lot of very fond memories of it. It was one of the very few shareware applications I registered as a kid - I didn't have a lot of money but I got a lot of use out of it.
Re: (Score:2)
Correct you are sir. I must have confused it with the early form of teletype email using the PSTN and the 910 area code.
Re: (Score:2)
Plenty of apps use the shareware model. Download a limited version (usually with ads) for free. Pay for all features and no advertisements.
Except that the model you describe is missing "you could share that limited version with anyone." Apps don't have an ecosystem where one user can share the app with someone else.
Re: (Score:2)
Sneakernet was often cheaper than what AT&T was charging for a long distance call to a BBS in the next city.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess I was fortunate that I always lived in pretty big cities back in the day, so I never had a shortage of local BBSes to call. Although I did cause some family drama that I still get reminded of to this day when my little sister broke her wrist at gymastics and spent several hours in the hospital alone because I had the phone lines tied up and had *70'd despite being told not to.
There are actually a handful of dialup BBSes left that I still call now and then, and long distance is no longer a problem wi