Saturday 21 January 2012

FreeDOS 1.1 IS BACK NOW!

The history of FreeDOS stems back to the summer of 1994 when Microsoft announced that MS-DOS as a separate product would no longer be supported. It would live on as part of Windows 95, 98, and (ugh!) Me, but for Jim Hall that wasn't , and so public domain (PD) DOS was born. Other developers quickly jumped on board, a kernel and utilities were made, as well as a usable version of PD-DOS began to emerge. It wouldn't be until 1998 that the first alpha build (version 0.05) was released, however; a slow trend that would continue, with a slew of betas culminating in a final one.0 build in 2006, some 12 years after the project begun. Finally, it would be renamed FreeDOS.

Some 17 years after its first release in 1994, and over years since one.0, FreeDOS one.1 the definitive, open source version of MS-DOS is now obtainable to download.

When I tell the story of FreeDOS to my friends the next query is usually: So, like, what's the point of FreeDOS? A fair query, given the maturity of Linux and its giant support framework. Well, for a start, FreeDOS is already extensively used by recovery disks. If you've ever made a boot disk for the sake of checking your hard disk or memory, or fixing a broken installation of Windows, you  certainly used FreeDOS.
Beyond that, though, FreeDOS is actually an excellent surroundings for educational or simple systems. Linux, compared to MS/FreeDOS, is fat. When combined with QBASIC or DJGPP (a C/C++ development surroundings), FreeDOS makes a surprisingly lovely development platform. It's also important to point out that FreeDOS isn't actually an old operating method: It supports FAT32 (with LBA) and UDMA for hard drives and DVD players, and the FreeDOS distro comes with an antivirus scanner as well as a BitTorrent client. USB support isn't there, but USB keyboards, mice, and outside storage can be finagled in to working.

When it comes down to it, though, the reason I am liking FreeDOS is that I can run it inside VirtualBox and play Doom. With a burst of nostalgia, I can fiddle around with HIMEM and EMM386 and Autoexec.bat to eke out  conventional memory to play Cannon Fodder. Ultimately, though, with DOSBox providing a much better (if less actual) gambling experience, I would must admit that FreeDOS is mostly a curio for old-timer geeks.

1 comments:

Blogger said...

Using AVG anti virus for a number of years, and I recommend this antivirus to all of you.

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