https://www.both.org/?p=3991
FreeDOS, the open-source OS that is helping keep the legacy of DOS alive, will turn 30 next week. Founded in 1994 by Jim Hall, then a college student, FreeDOS was created as a response to Microsoft's plans to phase out MS-DOS.
Three decades later, FreeDOS continues to thrive. Despite the dominance of Windows and macOS, FreeDOS finds unexpected relevance in niche markets.
>Some laptop manufacturers in certain countries bundle FreeDOS with new machines
introducing a new generation to the classic command-line interface.
Hall recently wrote a blog about the upcoming 30th anniversary.
These days, I'm really excited for all the different ways that people are using FreeDOS. For example, there's a community of enthusiasts who restore classic computers like the IBM PC 5150, PC XT, and PC AT, and put FreeDOS on them.
These are great systems that can't run something like Linux, so running FreeDOS is a great way to make these classic computers useful again.
I like that FreeDOS (like any DOS) is so easy to understand. There aren't a lot of moving parts in DOS: the computer boots and starts the kernel, the kernel reads FDCONFIG.SYS (or CONFIG.SYS) which defines the shell to run (usually COMMAND.COM), and COMMAND.COM runs a batch file (usually AUTOEXEC.BAT or FDAUTO.BAT) to set up the environment.
And then DOS presents you with a friendly command prompt where you can run commands and start programs.
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cool, can I run 2 programs though?
You can run windows 3.1 or freeGEOS inside it to get multitasking, and I think the old DOS multitasking driver still works on it.
Yes, I'm aware that I could run a different OS to get multitasking. I'm asking if freedos supports multitasking yet.
Those are more like DEs and kernel extensions than full operating systems. To answer you, no vanilla freedos does not support multitasking and doesn't intend to, but there are programs that allow you to do it. Basically any MS-DOS program will run on freeDOS, that includes DOS Shell, which allows multitasking. Here's a Vogons thread on various DOS multitasking utilities.
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62270
>vanilla freedos does not support multitasking
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHH
Why would it? Its DOS. All DOS does is run real mode x86 applications and act as a go between for the bios and programs. If you want additional features you run an extender.
>programs
program*
BWAHAHAHAHAHAH
Unix had multitasking when dos babies where still in their diapers.
UNIX was also a server operating system when a single program would use almost all of the 640KB home PCs had available. Home UNIX/UNIX-like OSes weren't even a thing until 94, after the last commercially available version of MS-DOS had been released and years after DOS had gained multitasking support through things like DOS Shell and Windows (which was a DOS DE at the time).
Are you fricktarded? What is xenix? (rand on Zilog Z8000 series, Digital LSI-11, Intel 8086 and 80286, Motorola 68000) have a nice day. NOW
ms-dos only existed because of market segmentation. They needed something to give the plebs so they could mark up xenix, so they specifically made a limited system. What they didn't expect was for ms-dos to be so popular and create a more lucrative software market than the professional software market. There was no technical limitation that prevented xenix from running on an say an ibm pc.
Why did it take so long for consumer UNIX likes to become a thing? Wouldn't someone else have stepped in if there was that much of a gap in the market?
Because of licensing
If it was a per sale license then that would explain the high cost, but if it was just a big lump sum then they probably could gone all in on xenix.
Was anybody ITT an AT&T IP lawyer circa 1980?
Typically a software licensing agreement will look like
1. upfront fee
2. royalties (per 1000 sales or whatever)
3. support fees
Since there was never a cheap unix we can assume that the royalties were probably pretty high.
Couldn't someone have written a multitasking multiuser OS without using UNIX code? Surely Linus wasn't the only person to have that idea.
Did CP/M have anything to do with it? I know DOS was basically a 16 bit clone of CP/M sold at half the price and the CP/M dominated the microcomputer market in the 70s.
They did, amiga ($2K) and lisa (apple $10K) were both multitasking mid 80s oses. I don't know about late 70s but maybe there are some
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS
Was the basis for the amgia system, it says here that they were working on a port to the 68000 in 81'.
Upon further research, even DOS got multitasking through multi user DOS, DOS 4.0, and of course Windows. Yet out of all of those, only windows succeeded, and that likely had more to do with the GUI aspect than the multi tasking. Maybe home users just weren't interested in multi tasking.
they got it but oems didn't buy it MS-DOS 4.0 isn't PC DOS 4.00 or MS-DOS 4.01
I know, I'm asking why niether DOS 4.0 nor multiuser DOS got adopted.
Why wouldn't home users want to run 2 programs it's pretty useful, using a text editor while compiling and testing your program for example
How many home users were compiling programs that would take long enough for that to be necessary? How many had a CPU fast enough for that to be doable?
54321
TSRs covered "power user" scenarios like this.
There were tons of multitasking add-ons and extenders for 286 and 386 machines.
The problem was having one that worked universally with all of your software. Microsoft took on this challenge while testing Windows 95. Also, by that time, many of the busted/unsupported programs from the early 80s were rarer.
So what, people could 70% of the functionality of Xenix for less than half the cost, and they figured that was good enough?
Why did it see so little adoption?
>Xenix systems shipped in July 1982.[12]:9[note 2] Tandy more than doubled the Xenix installed base when it made TRS-Xenix the default operating system for its TRS-80 Model 16 68000-based computer in early 1983,[17] and was the largest Unix vendor in 1984
It did, it just cost like $1000 1980s dollars (for no reason, xenix was written in assembly and c and ms-dos in
pure assembly)
>dumb frick doesn't even know how DOS works
either bait or underage
I know you're used to operating systems that are so bloated that they need GPU acceleration, 2GB of RAM, and 8 CPU cores just to display a mouse cursor, but with FreeDOS, the OS itself does not need or benefit from multi-threading.
FreeDOS can launch programs (which is a primary purpose of an OS) and those programs can use multi-threading if they want to.
I'm not sure what scenario this would be unacceptable. seems most likely that you are being disingenuous, or are moronic
Best it can do is
>terminate and stay resident
programs
The MSDOS 3+ API supports multiple processes but all the later DOS APIs are kind of insane and no one really used them.
Seems liked DOS devs had an aversion to using new features if they could at all avoid it. They never used the 286's protected mode.
DOS was first and foremost an 8086 operating system.
>look at the updooter here wanting more than one DOS primary partition, that shit is just bloat
the more things change, the more they stay the same
>Well well, look at the updooter with his fancy 4 megabytes of RAM
those are not different OSes. you can tell theyre not OSes by the fact that the computer does not have to restart.
DOS is surprisingly close to being a useable daily driver in current. All it needs is better hardware support and a better web browser.
If I can't fap to dicky on it, then it's just a curio, not an actually usable OS.
You can view images, watch mpeg4 video, and browse the web with tls 1.3 encryption on DOS.
probably dicky works all right but you cant get them from .torrent it would need to be on a ftp site or a compatible http site that hosts the pictures
also of course you cant enter Onions Network either
>torrent clients
I didn't find any in a few google searches, but I do know that hxdos extender lets you run some Win32 CLI programs. You might be able to use a CLI torrent client, alternatively porting one of the simpler Linux torrent clients wouldn't be that hard for a programmer.
FreeDOS will not be able to run natively in the upcoming "X86S" architecture spearheaded by Intel and eventually adopted by AMD.
Don't those have microcode to emulate i386 instructions? Regardless, freeDOS already doesn't run on pure UEFI systems.
What does development look like on say a pc98? You can only run 1 program, so you write a little bit then run your program? How does this work for long games? If you change something an hour into the game and want to see what it looks like? Do you just set the ip to start from there or what?
I imagine that's why level skip cheats were so common in old games.
>pc98
Aren't most nipgames just (image textbox*10 image textbox*10 image)*20 and maybe a short battle routine and some branching.
kill all zoomers
>tuhus gay
That's just an arcade game
This
They probably also had debugmodes somewhere.
Some old games have gameshark codes that enable debug tools.