Fire up your Compaq Deskpro: FreeDOS 1.4 is the first stable update since 2022
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Just make sure your PC has the required 640 KB of RAM. I needed to buy 16 - 64K x 1 ICs to add to my 286-12 MHz since it only came with 512 KB
(Well, I did when I still owned one last century
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(Well, I did when I still owned one last century
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Wait...
I love FreeDOS and think it's well worth supporting. But the idea that edlin needs updates is... it's like finding out that someone is wandering around gluing new bits of stone to boulders, because they think that they weren't boulder-y enough.
Edlin is supposed to be tiny, efficient, baffling and infuriating. In a world gone topsy-turvy, please a least leave us that!
What the hell is there to update in edlin?
I love FreeDOS and think it's well worth supporting. But the idea that edlin needs updates is... it's like finding out that someone is wandering around gluing new bits of stone to boulders, because they think that they weren't boulder-y enough.
Edlin is supposed to be tiny, efficient, baffling and infuriating. In a world gone topsy-turvy, please a least leave us that!
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Well one could add regular expressions and other stuff to try to bring it up to feature parity with a 1972 version of UNIX ed, at least.
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UTF-8 support?Wait...
What the hell is there to update in edlin?
I love FreeDOS and think it's well worth supporting. But the idea that edlin needs updates is... it's like finding out that someone is wandering around gluing new bits of stone to boulders, because they think that they weren't boulder-y enough.
Edlin is supposed to be tiny, efficient, baffling and infuriating. In a world gone topsy-turvy, please a least leave us that!
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This is DOS. A clone of CP/M. It has no truck with the luxuries of UNIX.
By comparison, the footprint of DOS hardware is so small that UNIX might confuse it for a tape controller, or perhaps a network card. If UNIX is a celebrated cathedral, DOS is a bus shelter on a rural road that nobody uses anymore.
Some pervert has no doubt ported ed to DOS. But the true ascetic, who has faith in simplicity and simplicity in their faith, shuns such fripperies. They know in their heart that edlin's simplicity is its strength, and that no matter how small a measure of strength it may be it is still strength nonetheless.
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That's a touch overblown.
We're used to Windows and MacOS being forcibly updated every month almost (or entirely) without regard to user sensibilities.
Linux gives the user the option to DIY, schedule it on your terms or do it automatically. Granted, they're all birds of a feather, but two are migratory and have no options to not be, and one can decide where or how it wants to weather the winter.
DOS, though is still around. Legacy systems mostly, or the tinkerer who can't bring themselves to get into a GUI situation. So it's nice to do the Linux thing for them once in a (very long) while. Personally, CLI's aren't my favorite way of running a computer, but it's a very familiar way of running a computer. And I'm grateful for having started out with a CLI UI since these days, if you ask someone to bring up the Terminal (or DOS screen), they usually have panic attack...
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UTF-8 support?
You win.
I'm going to bed now, where I shall attempt to forget that the idea of updating edlin ever existed..
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Hopefully it was a change to make it more lightweight. Some of the FreeDOS utilities are rather heavy, especially for older systems like XT class machines. FreeEdit especially suffers from this compared to the MS-DOS EditorWait...
What the hell is there to update in edlin?
I love FreeDOS and think it's well worth supporting. But the idea that edlin needs updates is... it's like finding out that someone is wandering around gluing new bits of stone to boulders, because they think that they weren't boulder-y enough.
Edlin is supposed to be tiny, efficient, baffling and infuriating. In a world gone topsy-turvy, please a least leave us that!
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The last major change altered the "Abort edit" prompt to say "Really quit" because that's always been a bit confusing and people lost WIP. There have been some fixes over the years to fix odd locales too, MS wasn't worried about whether umlauts work properly everywhere while FreeDOS does.
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Ok, I got curious here’s the change log for edlin in FreeDOS (took me surprisingly long to find, maybe because I’m on my phone):
https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/base/edlin/-/blob/master/DOC/EDLIN/CHANGES?ref_type=heads
Mostly looks like updating messages/menu titles.
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Lots of hardware runs forever on old computer systems, because the tool they support still works fine. From woodshops to hospitals.
Maybe this could be a way to fix or maintain the computer system, should it fail while the tool still works (I'm completely spitballing here).
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And if all you need for your industrial application is a free lightweight single tasking PC based operating system why overcomplicate it with something like Linux when you can just use DOS to make any old PC into a single purpose widget
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There are people/companies which were using DOS based software/hardware products and they can't/won't upgrade out of that.
There are also companies which are still selling DOS based embedded products.
And some people enjoy playing old games in their "natural" environment just for the sake of the game.
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Though for that last case, at least for myself I prefer using genuine old copies of DOS on period hardware, but if you need to do it on newer hardware for compatibility then FreeDOS is a great call
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Well that 1972 version of ed ran on a PDP-11 with 64k RAM, so it was a pretty small system.
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Just peeked at the long list.
It's great to see lots of actively maintained modern-useful stuff for retro hardware & virtual machines. I went down the rabbit hole reading the standard FreeDOS distributions / third party FreeDOS distributions.
...From the itty bitty floppy distributions
...All the way to the big retro-HDD-filling package that includes tons of goodies like a DOS version of Perl and an improved DOS version of 7-zip (etc) and improved DOS TCP/IP to attack pesky networks and files difficult to otherwise use in DOS.
It's great to see lots of actively maintained modern-useful stuff for retro hardware & virtual machines. I went down the rabbit hole reading the standard FreeDOS distributions / third party FreeDOS distributions.
...From the itty bitty floppy distributions
...All the way to the big retro-HDD-filling package that includes tons of goodies like a DOS version of Perl and an improved DOS version of 7-zip (etc) and improved DOS TCP/IP to attack pesky networks and files difficult to otherwise use in DOS.
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OpenGEM is broken out of the box requiring you to use SWSUBST (an expanded version of subst in ms/pc/Dr dos) to map the opengem folder to a drive letter.
May be better to use PC/Geos which is a opensource and updated version of GEOS/Breadbox ensemble
May be better to use PC/Geos which is a opensource and updated version of GEOS/Breadbox ensemble
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When your computer runs a million-dollar machine, and the people who wrote the software are out of business or dead, you're very hesitant to mess with "upgrades".
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Many uses. Old software is obviously the biggest. Industrial software, old games, shoot, certain writers use DOS when cranking out pages. FreeDOS has its niche just like everything else.
EDIT: A motherboard I own used it for BIOS updates. You could grab a disk image, flash/write it to your choice of media, boot up, and the bios would update.
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Famed writer George R. R. Martin could install Wordstar on it to continue not writing.
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1st: It's a joke. Lighten up.
2nd: The overwhelming majority of the monthly Microsoft update roll-up patches are bug and security fixes which are 100% necessary in the security environment we live in. Everyone from kids to grandmothers are a target bar none. Skip them at risk. They are postpone-able but not skip-able for a reason.
3rd: Macs don't have a regular update cycle to begin with. Apple releases when they either must for security updates, or when they deem the update ready - and you don't have to update immediately same as Microsoft.
4th: Linux distros may give the option to update or not, but the reality is you skip security updates at your own peril just like Microsoft's updates. Linux distros do occasionally screw the pooch with bad updates or bad package defaults, even the LTS ones. If you're update adverse, stay off the Internet entirely.
The day of lax personal & software security and updating is long since gone. No product that you and I can buy for personal GP computing is perfect.
--------- EOR (end of rant) ----------
Personally, I still occasionally use FreeDOS to more reliably read and/or erase floppy disks as a forensic tool. Modern tools just aren't good enough in many cases, especially mtools in the Unix realm. Don't use it. It's not reliable. Magnetic media that old requires handling that apparently "modern" tools are incapable of managing. Sometimes you need special hardware to read ancient MSDOS written floppy disks, but for the most part I've found FreeDOS and a period floppy drive good enough, especially if there's more than one copy of the files.
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I have some old ass software at work that /might/ work in freedos. I can't remember if I gave it a real try. It didn't work the last time I tried it in reactos, and the 2kpro vm I have it running in works well enough, but I would prefer libre software, just cause. The software itself is proprietary, and from a company that's long gone. It's from 1997.
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That sort of old ass hardware needing DOS is still around and will be for a while. Used to work for a place that built and programmed ticket vending machines. Large ones with coin&bill acceptors, a screen with 8 MMI buttons, a receipt and ticket printer (where printing had to be very flexible), service interface etc etc etc.
It was all done in DOS (with 3rd party software for the multitasking) and still runs to this day. I left before 2023.
It was all done in DOS (with 3rd party software for the multitasking) and still runs to this day. I left before 2023.
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I've still got my Microsoft Entertainment Pack floppies that I'd like to install some games I'd like to play, as well as Chessmaster 2000. (Leisure Suit Larry can stay where he is.)
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I don't know what people use it for. But the biggest install base of FreeDOS is computer manufacturers pre-installing it so that they never sell a computer without an operating system (i.e. to circumvent a 'anti-piracy' regulations likely imposed by some big OS manufacturer to increase their sales).
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I seem to recall reading it's popular in some poorer parts of the world.
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I found some old floppies, and have been going through them. Many are decayed beyond reading, but I've found what I think will be old source code.
One of my first software purchases was Microsoft QuickBASIC 4.5 Professional. No, not the QBASIC that shipped with DOS - its bigger brother that could compile to executables.
Sadly the default file format for QuickBASIC 4.5 is not text, but a tokenised format. There are some open-source decoders, but the authors admit that they may not handle all tokens, so I'd rather use something official.
Both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code lack any form of official importer from Microsoft, an inexplicable omission given that they only stopped selling QuickBASIC 4.5 some 30 years ago. I'd complain to my account manager, if I had one...
My best chance for reading this source code is simply to create a small VM, install FreeDOS, install QuickBASIC 4.5 and then open the files there. And hopefully then save it as a text file so that this problem doesn't occur again!
Of course, this is source code for a program I wrote when I was fifteen or sixteen. In a compiled BASIC. It's going to be bad code. Quite possibly hilariously bad code. But I still want to see it. I know that the program is useless today, and the code is bad. But it'd be nice to see it again. Sometimes it's just nice to be able to go back, in some small way.
There are related purposes beyond nostalgia. Support for legacy systems, or perhaps discovery in a lawsuit where you want to show when you first used a technique.
But if I'm honest, I suspect it's mostly nostalgia.
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And will probably run the next 50 years - with the exact same software. Because it just works.
Even mentioning the idea to "update" this to FreeDOS probably will get you instantly fired.
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Anton Longshot
Ars Centurion
As I have a modest (no active cooling) unfinished machine sitting here I'm tempted to finally give it a power supply and install FreeDOS.
Nostalgia FTW!
[/edit] the thing has 8GB RAM I believe - I just realized that back in the day that was a to-tal-ly insane amount.
Not to mention the 120(?)GB SSD : my first box had a 10MB harddisk.
Nostalgia FTW!
[/edit] the thing has 8GB RAM I believe - I just realized that back in the day that was a to-tal-ly insane amount.
Not to mention the 120(?)GB SSD : my first box had a 10MB harddisk.
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