Developer interview: DOS is (long) dead, long live FreeDOS
- 05 February, 2013 15:52
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Hall has mulled a range of ideas for the future of the system, asking on his blog, "in an alternate reality, what would DOS had looked like if Microsoft hadn't moved to Windows?"
"I envision FreeDOS '2.0' as being a more modern version based on FreeDOS 1.0 (or 1.1, if I can convince someone to package up our current software set into a new release.) But FreeDOS '3.0' or some later version should switch to a multi-tasking FreeDOS model, with expanded driver support. Especially network driver support," Hall wrote.
Hall says that his views on what FreeDOS should be continue to evolve, but he says that the team should still try to envisage what a 'modern FreeDOS' should look like.
"Our challenge is to do that in a way that doesn't change the essentials," he says.
"FreeDOS is and always will be DOS, and DOS software still needs to keep working on FreeDOS. If we break applications, we will have failed. But I think it would be interesting to define the evolution of FreeDOS to something more modern."
Compatibility with legacy applications has always been a big part of FreeDOS's appeal. "You should be able to take any old DOS program out of the box, install it on FreeDOS, and it should 'just work'," Hall says.
However, there have been a number of applications written specifically for FreeDOS. "Developers write new tools and utilities that run on FreeDOS: music players, network tools, a Web browser, editors, boot managers, just to name a few. We include many of these in our FreeDOS distribution."
The development team has about two dozen regular contributors, as well as a number of occasional contributors. Hall says it's easy for interested people to get involved, and adds that "it's important to remember that with free and open source software, you don't need to be a developer or write code in order to contribute.
"Projects like FreeDOS always need people who are interested in writing documentation (wikis, etc.) or answering questions, or testing programs on all kinds of hardware.
"FreeDOS is used by people all over the world, and many years back I wrote a library that allows FreeDOS programs to interact with the user in the user's native language. FreeDOS can work with many different languages — and that's another way people can help out with FreeDOS, by translating these messages and sending them back to the developer."
The project has a set of open mailing lists people can sign up to and all software is released under the GPL or a similar free software licence.
"I'm generally very proud of the great work we have done as a community," Hall says. " When I started FreeDOS, I really didn't think very many people would get involved with it. Just some particularly interested developers, and I was happy to have the few join me at the start."
Among the many people who have worked on the project, he makes special note of Pat Villani, the creator of the FreeDOS kernel who passed away in 2011, Jim Tabor who added network and CD-ROM drive support, and the author of FreeDOS's first command line interpreter FreeCOM, Tim Norman.
Although FreeDOS has been used and distributed by a number of big name IT companies Hall says the project hasn't received any formal support from them. Occasionally an engineer who needs help will drop him a line. And he says he remembers in the early days of the project receiving an email from an @microsoft.com email address.
"It wasn't Bill Gates or anyone with a name I recognised; probably some programmer deep in the company, or maybe an intern," he says.
"This person basically said that DOS was dead and Windows was the new thing, and he didn't expect our FreeDOS to get very far. But it's 2013, and people are still downloading and using FreeDOS, so I guess that's that."
Rohan Pearce is the editor of Techworld Australia and Computerworld Australia. Contact him at rohan_pearce at idg.com.au.
Follow Rohan on Twitter: @rohan_p
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Comments
Brian Knoblauch
1
As an developer who wrote a number of utilities for DESQview back in the day, I'd love to see TopView / DESQview support too if it's possible!
Dimiter 'malkia' Stanev
2
I wrote several small resident applications. One of them was a mini-debugger that you can activate at any time. The other one was a Process-Killer (Ctrl-~) and you kill anything loaded after you. A friend of mine rewrote it from Turbo Pascal 3.0 into assembler and got it from 5kb to hundreth or so bytes.
Exciting times :) - and there are still plenty of good old games that require DOS (Star Control I & II, Heroes of Might and Magic I & II, even III had DOS version, and many more)
l
3
The natural evolution for FreeDOS would be the same MS‐DOS took before MS Windows, from being a DOS shell, became an operating system: OS/2. And, from there, OS/2 NT, which was like the current MS Windows NT with Presentation Manager instead of Windows on top.
Or, even before that, the Config.sys Switchar option was meant to enable DOS to use / as a file system name separator so people could migrate to Unix over time.
cavokz
4
One of the few posts I've ever written is about DOS.
https://cavokz.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/rebooting-dos/
jon
5
I'm a complete noob at this stuff, but I was wondering what the chances are that an operating system could be made that is 100% binary compatible to Windows (similar to what FreeDOS has done)? Maybe start small and try for win95 and work up from there. To me, that sounds like a lot better approach that what wine has done. Again, I'm a complete noob, just throwing out ideas.
david
6
@jon - For a windows clone (still in development), see ReactOS - http://www.reactos.org/.
You can run a fairly large selection of Windows software under Linux using Wine too (http://www.winehq.org/).
Ian Taylor
7
"It is a terrifying thought that many people under 30 will never see a "C:\>" prompt.."
Yes, like it is terrifying that those same people won't experience having to hand-crank a car engine, or use hand signals to turn or brake!
xyz
8
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