FreeDOS 1.2

[mysterydip]

FreeDOS saved my bacon some years ago. I was working at a college and one day a chemistry prof came in and said their spectrometer (IIRC) was dying. I took a look and found an old 386-based machine with a hard drive on the fritz. It ran some odd version of DOS from a company that no longer existed, there was no budget for a replacement, and classes relying on it were starting soon.

My memory is hazy but I was able to get a compactflash card with FreeDOS on it and used it to boot the system. The special programs that operated the device over the serial or parallel port took a little work to keep from crashing, but eventually all was working as before.

[ZanyProgrammer]

It amazes me that people on HN have anecdotes for everything.

[rootbear]

I've had similar experiences with embedded PCs. I keep a copy of FreeDOS handy for just such situations.

[suprjami]

For all people wondering why FreeDOS is important, this is it. Education needs Free Software.

[endgame]

Merry Christmas to the FreeDOS project, and congratulations. It's great to see you lot keeping on.

Does anyone here know the plans for the future, now that UEFI is on most new consumer PCs? Will it be considered "done" at some point or will it get adapted into something else?

[carlosrg]

I'm interested in this too. I'm tempted to install it just to remember old times - play around FreePascal and real mode programming, inline assembly and so on - and I guess supporting UEFI would make it easier to coexist with modern Windows/Linux installs.

[vram22]

Used to like working on DOS. Many of the apps on it were very fast to use, as others have said.

And TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident programs) [1] were fun to use. I particularly liked Borland Sidekick (a multi-utility tool that could be popped up via a hot-key on top of whatever program you were running). [2] Sidekick sold tons of copies, I read.

Edit: According to the Wikipedia article below, "Sidekick sold more than 1 million copies in its first three years".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminate_and_stay_resident_pr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick

[fsiefken]

DOS + Win 3.11 was very fast compared to Windows (9x, XP, 7 and 10), OSX or Linux nowadays and there were lots of good games written for the platform (MOO1, CIV1, Duke Nukem 3D).

I read about the problems with Windows 3.11 protected mode, does FreeDOS 1.2 allow you to run Windows 3.11 in 386enh and protected mode? A certain Jeremy David wrote support for it, and I read that a windows 3 compatible kernel was available in FreeDOS 1.0 under the name Winkernel. It should be used without EMM386 but with Japheth's versions of HIMEMX and SHARE, allocating at most 256 MB of RAM to HIMEMEX. With some tweaking of the Windows config, it is possible to use 1 GB, but not more. Do not use protected mode disk drivers. There is SVGAPatch: a tool to patch svga256.drv to make it VESA compliant so Win 3.11 can be used within Virtualbox. http://web.archive.org/web/20140202233045/http://www.japheth... http://stephan.win31.de/w31mm_en.htm https://www.kirsle.net/blog/entry/nostalgia-for-windows-3-1

Conceivably it could be used to access the internet somewhat with Win32s in combination with Dillo of D+ browser. http://dillo-win.osdn.jp/index.en.html https://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/

I remember that for DOS semi-multitasking you could use DESQview, does that work with FreeDOS and are there better (more efficient or open source) alternatives?

I am asking as you could make a very lean and fast OS, booting form USB, extracting itself to a ramdisk, allocating 500M (with tools, editors and games) and 500M for windows.

Perhaps HaikuOS, NT 3.51, Windows ME with KernelEx or the new OS/2 5 (ArcaOS), or Win7PE or Win10PE are more capable and similarly faster compared to Ubuntu, Windows7/10 or OSX. https://www.arcanoae.com/current-release-timetable-arcaos-5-... http://theoven.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=4883b8169b752f637e361...

[jerf]

"DOS + Win 3.11 was very fast compared to Windows (9x, XP, 7 and 10), OSX or Linux nowadays"

You either have some seriously rose-colored glasses on, or you need to put an SSD in your current computer because a lot of the slowness of modern machines lies in the increasingly-obsolete hard drive. (Due to the increasing prevalence of cheap SMR [1] drives in consumer-grade gear, I'm not just saying "increasingly-obsolete" for rhetorical purposes; cheap hard drives are actually regressing in performance lately.) I remember multi-minute boot times and multi-minute load times for things like office suites and such, which are now entirely foreign to me.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

[kruhft]

If anybody is interested in some 'current' open source MS-DOS software, I put up my old undergraduate thesis sources from 1997 recently:

    https://github.com/burtonsamograd/xp32

Te repo has a full DJGPP (GCC for DOS) toolchain environment included to build the included sources of the project, so you can just clone and build.

Probably a lot easier to understand and build than the Doom sources.

[suprjami]

Does it run in DOSBox? If so, capture a video and upload to YouTube, that's the popular thing to do with demos these days, the higher-res the better.

Need that crisp 2048x1080 Second Reality by Future Crew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA

[dispose13432]

Ahh, an OS which never had vendor lock-in, and had multiple independent vendors.

That dream died with Windows.

[ZenoArrow]

>"multiple independent vendors"

Unless I'm missing something, there weren't multiple vendors for MS-DOS pre-Windows.

[rasz_pl]

1.2 ships with 4 year old and broken CDRom driver, CD audio and CD detection doesnt work in a bunch of old games(for example Need For Speed).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGmCVeAKR4w

[edem]

How is this useful in 2016? I'm genuinely curious.

[amalcon]

DOS was and is an absolutely tiny operating system. The job of an OS is to act as an intermediary between you and the hardware.

Sometimes, having stuff between you and the hardware is a problem. DOS lets you basically just use the hardware directly, so it can make sense for some types of control systems or firmware updaters.

[kijin]

A lot of new PCs in my (highly piratey) country come with FreeDOS pre-installed. You won't see them in retail stores, but they're offered for a significant discount online, even from major brands like Asus and Lenovo.

I have taken advantage of these offers several times to avoid buying a Windows license for a computer I intended to run Linux on, or to install a different version and/or language of Windows than the one the manufacturer offered by default. Sometimes I even buy Windows separately at additional cost, just to avoid the bloatware and spyware.

I have several theories about why manufacturers choose to do this instead of just leaving the disk unformatted or using a proper user-friendly Linux distro. By having another O/S pre-installed, they can claim that they are giving consumers a choice rather than outright encouraging piracy. But since most people who buy these PCs put pirated Windows on it anyway, they don't want to pre-install anything that they might need to support seriously. This means using a minimal O/S that "just works" but one that nobody is actually going to use as a daily driver. FreeDOS fits that bill, whether the developers like it or not. I'm grateful that it exists.

[qwertyuiop924]

First off, DOS has very direct hardware access. This means it works very well in more embedded environements. It also means it's just flat-out fun to hack on for some sorts of people, for much the same reasons that, say, ITS was fun to hack on (although no ITS user would ever admit to liking DOS, obviously)

Secondly, FreeDOS is useful for bringing a semi-modern operating system to your 486 or whatever, without it being unbearably slow: breathe some life into the thing.

Finally, legacy software. DOS has a massive library of some of the finest software ever conceived: games in particular. Doom, Quake, Duke3D, Wolf3D, King's Quest, Monkey Island, Myst, Lemmings, Dune II, Descent, various Infocom games, and far more that was less widely ported than the above and hard to play nowadays.

[sigstoat]

until a few years back, my company still owned some old scientific equipment whose software ran on DOS.

we've still got equipment which is controlled by software that runs on XP (and does not work on anything else). i should probably donate a bit to ReactOS, because i expect i'll need it sooner or later.

these sorts of projects can keep perfectly good, old equipment running and useful. (and considering the aversion some physical scientists have to computers, save drastically on training costs.)

[Sanddancer]

It has a lot of uses here and there. A ton of companies use it as the OS for their hardware diagnostic packages, or for things like firmware updates. It claims very little of the hardware for its own, so it makes it a lot easier to do things like low level format a hard drive without having to worry about some other driver/process messing with things.

[jszymborski]

Haven't been to HMV in about 5 years, but all the point-of-sale computers ran DOS at the Montreal locations I'd been too.

Went to a local bookstore recently, seemed they were running a DOS app too.

So unless they are emulating (a distinct possibility), they can use FreeDOS to run natively.

And if not for enterprise-sake, then just for fun :P

[tscs37]

I have it on an super old desktop with even older serial adapters so we can maintain an ancient piece of machinery that nobody has a plan how it works.

Additionally, some OEMs will ship PC/Laptops "without OS" which usually means "FreeDOS preinstalled"

[naner]

I still use it infrequently for firmware updates for certain hardware that's only delivered as DOS executables. I also needed to deploy such an update to a large number of embedded systems and ended up pxe booting freeDOS (not challenging to setup, but pxe booting DOS seems a little humorous). FreeDOS is a lot nicer to deal with than DOS or DRMK.

[vacri]

I'm not sure if this is "the" DOS used[1], but MS forces a contract on vendors saying that they can't sell a server without an operating system, as basically a way to help force out ^nix (vendors don't want to support a full-blown ^nix, so don't want to ship one). However, FreeDOS is an operating system with extremely limited functionality - there's nothing to support. This gives those vendors an 'out', so they don't lose clients who don't want to pay for MS licenses.

[1] I think it's FreeDOS that's an option on servers, but I can't recall. I've been cloud-ey for too long :(

[guard-of-terra]

When I bought my current PC (custom assembled for me from parts I chose) a few years ago, they installed FreeDOS on it. It booted all right from SSD and could DIR onto 37" LED TV.

[gjvc]

for running firmware updates for some (older) devices

[epx]

Gambling machines are one niche that, last find I checked, still used it a lot.

[wamatt]

Depends on whether one's utility function definition, includes the nostalgia parameter

[beachstartup]

install onto a stick or disc for server firmware upgrades.

"but the cloud..."

someone maintains that cloud, every day.

[psibi]

I occasionally play Dave using it. :-)

[pavlov]

An operating system hosted on SourceForge, whose "drivers" directory includes support for a grand total of two devices -- the IBM PC floppy and the PC/AT clock [1]. DOS thinks different!

(Of course counting drivers in DOS is highly misleading, as the BIOS [2] directly offers all the useful calls like "turn on cassette drive motor" and "read joystick" that you will need to build modern microcomputer software.)

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/svn/HEAD/tree/kernel/trunk...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_interrupt_call

[DHowett]

This doesn't seem to be a particularly kind or constructive comment.

The linked article opens with:

DOS isn't exactly a moving target anymore, so we don't have to chase new features or shifting compatibility.

Are you making a commentary on the usefulness of DOS or of FreeDOS as a project?

[jmspring]

Helpful how?

There are problems where access to a DOS command line and ability to run applications is useful.

[vram22]

If anyone is interested in doing TCP/IP networking on DOS (and it may work on FreeDOS [1]), read on:

Reading this thread, I just remembered that I used to have an old IBM PC Jr that ran DOS (years earlier), a great machine hardware-wise (though it was not a marketing success, I've read). And some time back I had written this post about it:

Lissajous hippo, retrocomputing and the IBM PC Jr.:

https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/lissajous-hippo.html

While looking up info about the PC Jr. for that post, I came across Mike Brutman's PC Jr. page (mentioned in my blog post):

http://www.brutman.com/PCjr/

He was an IBM employee for a long time and so had access to good info about the PC Jr. - both hardware and software, and his page above is one he maintains about that machine - a sort of retrocomputing site about the Jr.

We then talked some on email, and he told me he had built a TCP stack for DOS and was running it on his Jr. That page is here:

http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP.html

He says others are also using mTCP, for fun, work and even business.

Here's an excerpt from his overview section about mTCP:

[1]:

[ mTCP should run on all variants of DOS including IBM PC-DOS, Microsoft MS-DOS, DR-DOS and FreeDOS. All of these applications will run well on the oldest, slowest PC that you can find - I routinely use them on an IBM PCjr made in 1983 because nothing beats the fun of putting a 30+ year old computer on the Internet.

People are using mTCP for goofing off and for real work. If you have a DOS machine that needs to send data across the network mTCP can help you get that done. Besides its utility to vintage computers I have heard of people using it to transfer lab data from dedicated industrial PCs, allowing backups to be run on old machines, and sending sales reports from the branch offices of a retail store to a central server.

Don't have a vintage computer laying around? No problem! mTCP applications will run in a variety of virtual and emulated environments. It has been tested with DOSBox, SwsVpkt, VirtualBox and VMWare. See the documentation for the details. ]

[cr0sh]

mTCP is pretty sweet; I once ran it (IIRC) to set up an FTP server so I could transfer some files from the base system to a vbox VM running FreeDOS (I think it was to play around with some old QB4.5 code of mine from over a decade ago). To be honest, there was probably an easier way to do it, but I may have been hindered by the "draconian" rules we had on these machines (Win8 boxes, and we didn't have admin access) - or maybe I just wanted to see if it could be done. I don't really recall...

[innocentoldguy]

I love the FreeDOS project. While my first computer (a Kaypro II luggable - http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html) ran CP/M, my career in software began with PC-DOS on an IBM 5150. Every now and then, I like to run some of my old apps on FreeDOS, just to how far we've come (and how far we haven't, in some respects).

[throw7]

I still keep a FreeDOS install on most of my usb keys I carry around.

Just tried out the new version... nice updated installer. The old one would write out the install really slow. Gratz and thank you.

[rocky1138]

The "why this exists" part of the home page is pure hacker. Kudos!

[xianwen]

I am curious to see functionality development in FreeDOS, for example, in include a capability to run SSH with X11 forwarding. It will be very interesting and useful.

[stuaxo]

Is there a changelog somewhere ?

[digi_owl]

It would be tempting to try a DOS web browser in this day and age.

[UncleSlacky]

Your best bet is probably Arachne: http://www.glennmcc.org/