I grew up in the decades of 1970 and 1980, And that meant I grew up with computers. Our first home computer was an Apple II, and my brother and I learned about BASIC programming at Apple. I wrote a lot of math puzzles and games, because that is truly the limit of AppleSoft BASIC programming.
Later, our family replaced Apple with an IBM PC and was excited to try the new DOS command line. DOS provided its own BASIC, but also a lot of tools. Well, in those days “host” it meant about twenty profits, most for working with floppy disks and files. it wasn't until MS-DOS 5 that I felt that DOS had truly become “modern”. This version, released in 1991, replaced the venerable “line editor” by Edlin for a full screen interactive editor. It also included a brand new QBASIC programming environment and an incredibly useful DOS shell that supported task switching., a forerunner of true multitasking.
And it was in this new system that I learned to program in C and other languages. With this new knowledge, I wrote my own utilities to boost the DOS command line, sometimes creating absolutely new versions of existing DOS utilities with additional features and functionality. I felt like a true "power user" of DOS and was very comfortable on the command line. I did a lot of my work on the command line, with my own tools to manage my directories and process files, but relying on my favorite DOS apps to write class assignments or play games when I wanted to relax.
On 1993, I learned about Linux and considered it as my next “step forward” fingers. I installed one of the first Linux distributions on my small PC at home, but i couldn't finish DOS completely. Linux didn't have many applications in those early days, so many times I would restart in DOS to use my word processor or my spreadsheet. I loved DOS and trusted him.
So you can imagine that he was a bit annoyed to find out in 1994 that Microsoft was planning “finish” with MS-DOS the following year. According to interviews in technology magazines, Microsoft's next version of Windows wouldn't need MS-DOS, and DOS would effectively become an operating system “dead”. They all had to upgrade to Windows.
I had used Windows at this point and was not a fan. If you remember Windows 3 at that moment, you will know it was not a great experience. I thought Windows was slow and unreliable. When a Windows application has problems, that app can kill all windows. And I think: “If Windows 4 looks somewhat like Windows 3, I don't want anything to do with it”. Therefore I decided to stick with Linux and DOS.
But if Microsoft was exiting the DOS game, How could I keep running DOS?
I decided that if we wanted to keep TWO, we had to do ours. I asked on Usenet, the forums or “message boards” of the day, and asked if anyone was working on their own DOS. The solution was “no”, but people thought it was an interesting idea.
A few months later, the 29 June 1994, i did this ad in comp.os.msdos.apps:
Announcing the first effort to produce a PD-DOS. I have written a “manifest” that describes the objectives of said project and an outline of the work, as well as a “things to do” which shows exactly what should be written. I will post them here and let the discussion follow.
I called it “PD-DOS” because I wanted to create a DOS that was cost-free for everyone to use, and I thought that meant “public domain”. But it didn't take us long to realize the difference between the public domain and "free software.", therefore we change the name to Free-DOS after a few weeks. Later we drop the script to become FreeDOS.
I'll keep the details about the history of FreeDOS for you, Except to say we had a very frequent release cycle and added a bunch of new utilities to DOS. We divide FreeDOS into “groups”: the group “Base” replaced core MS-DOS functions, and other groups provided editors, development tools and drivers. And everything was open source. As an example, the group “Lang” included the MicroC compiler and Val Linker so that FreeDOS developers could compile C programs. You can't have open source DOS if developers don't have open source tools to build more FreeDOS.
It took us a long time before we felt comfortable releasing a version of FreeDOS that was sufficiently “complete” to win the tag “1.0”. FreeDOS 1.0 In conclusion appeared in September 2006. Development slowed down after that, mainly because DOS was no longer a moving target in 1995 when Microsoft released Windows 95 and stopped making new versions of MS-DOS. It took another six years before we released FreeDOS 1.1 in january 2012, and four years later for FreeDOS 1.2 in december 2016. Each version added new functions, including new drivers for modern hardware, updated software and new tools.
FreeDOS as a modern DOS
We are working on the next version of FreeDOS and released Candidate version 4 by FreeDOS 1.3 in april 2021. We are very proud of this new version, especially in the way “Live CD” which allows you to run FreeDOS from the CD, without having to install anything on a hard drive.
If you don't want to run FreeDOS from the LiveCD, you can also install it on your hard drive. We update the installer in FreeDOS so that it detects all kinds of conditions and takes the appropriate action, how to create a new disk partition for FreeDOS if none exists.
Older FreeDOS distributions used to ask you for everything, even choose individual programs to install. The new installer is highly optimized. Asks you some questions to get started, subsequently does everything else on its own. Installing FreeDOS on an empty virtual machine only takes a few minutes.
It's great that you can customize your FreeDOS installation. DOS was never a great operating system, but FreeDOS includes a lot of optional software in the distribution. To save space, start by installing a minimal system, then use the FDIMPLES package manager to install the additional packages you want to use. Don't forget that FreeDOS 1.3 RC4 also includes a CD “Bonus” full of additional programs that you may also find interesting.
FreeDOS 1.3 RC4 also includes a range of Linux and Unix tools.. If you are a Linux user, you should feel right at home with commands like cal, of, grep, sed, less, head, tr, tee and even a version of Unix nroff called NRO. One of my favorite Unix utilities in FreeDOS is the Freemacs editor, an editor very similar to Linux GNU Emacs.
If you don't like Freemacs or the standard DOS Edit text editors, you can select from over a dozen editors to suit your style. More recently, i switched to EDF, a folding editor who “fold” code blocks so you can see more of your program on one screen. FED also adds color to its code lists, so the keywords, the comments, numbers and other program features are highlighted to help you catch errors before compiling.
If you want to write your own programs, we also have several compilers and assemblers. A recent addition is an IA-16 version of GCC. This requires a CPU of 32 bits to compile, But the programs you create can run on any computer system. 16 bits. We also provide the DJGPP C compiler for 32 bits, which probably looks more like the GCC you are used to in Linux. For most of my programming, I prefer the OpenWatcom C compiler.
But most of the people use FreeDOS to play. And that's great, we even include some of ours. If you like arcade style shooting games, fly missions in WING or Kraptor. For classic games to kill time, pruebe Nibbles o Tetris. And FreeDOS has many other fun games from a range of genres.; find the one you like the most.
You can find the new FreeDOS 1.3 RC4 in the FreeDOS website, on our Downloads page. To install FreeDOS, will need at least 20 MB of free disk space: 20 MB to install a simple FreeDOS system and 250 MB to install everything, including apps and games. To also install the source code, you will need up to 450 MB free space.
