So we installed FreeDOS on a spare PC, found the DOS program on a website somewhere, and used that to read and export the data into CSV files. They had some old research data on the disks, but the data was in a proprietary file format from an old DOS program. One day, one of the faculty brought in some floppy disks. For example, I used to work at a university. Others may run legacy DOS applications because they need to recover some old data, or maybe they need to run a report from a legacy business application. I’ll sometimes boot FreeDOS just to run AsEasyAs, my favorite shareware spreadsheet program. People need to run legacy DOS applications from time to time, even today. We include games from different genres, so there should be something for everyone. But since so many people use FreeDOS to play DOS games, we thought it was important to include some games of our own. This was a conscious decision for the FreeDOS 1.2 release we did not include games in previous official FreeDOS distributions. We also include several open source games in the FreeDOS 1.2 distribution. And FreeDOS makes it very easy to run games. Sure, you can run these in something like DOSBox, but I like the experience of running these games in an actual DOS system. For example, I still boot FreeDOS to play Commander Keen, or DOOM, or Dark Forces, or several other classic games. Just because a game is old doesn’t mean it stopped being fun! There are a lot of great classic DOS games to play, even though the graphical resolution and polygon count doesn’t compare to modern games. We find there are three or four reasons people install FreeDOS today: Jim Hall: We posted a survey several years ago, and asked people why they use FreeDOS. It’s FOSS: Why would someone want to install FreeDOS? People thought that was a good idea, so I did it. I made an announcement in the comp.os.msdos.apps online discussion group, via Usenet, that I wanted to create a free version of DOS. After all, DOS is a much simpler operating system. Since I’d used Linux, it occurred to me that if developers could come together to create a free Unix system, surely we could do the same with a free DOS. I thought, “If Windows 3.2 or 4.0 is anything like Windows 3.1, I don’t want anything to do with it.” In 1994, I started to see a lot of articles claiming that Microsoft planned to finally “do away” with DOS with the next version of Windows. And I needed those to do my work as a student. Linux did all the work of the “big Unix” systems in our campus computer lab, but there weren’t a lot of Linux applications yet. My first distribution was Softlanding Linux System (SLS) which I dual-booted on my computer with DOS. I’d also discovered Linux while at college. And if you remember Windows 3.1 at the time, it wasn’t great. Sure, the campus had a PC computer lab with Microsoft Windows, but that was Windows 3.1. I had discovered some shareware programs that made my life easier as a student: the As Easy As spreadsheet, the Telix terminal program, and the Galaxy Write word processor. I considered myself a DOS power-user by that time. And not incidentally, I taught myself how to write programs in DOS, and created several personal utilities that extended the DOS command line and made it more useful to me.įast forward to the early 1990s, when I was an undergraduate physics student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. That was where I first learned to use DOS. When I was growing up, we were fortunate to have a PC at home. Jim Hall: I’d been a DOS user for many years. It’s FOSS: How did FreeDOS project get started? What was the inspiration behind it? ![]() ![]() To help celebrate those many years and help raise awareness for the project, I connected with Jim Hall (FreeDOS founder and lead developer) and asked him a few questions. This year marks the 23rd anniversary of the FreeDOS project.
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