Jim Hall is celebrating the 23rd birthday of the FreeDOS Project, calling it “a major milestone for any free software or open-source software project,” and remembering how it all started. An anonymous reader quotes Linux Journal:
If you remember Windows 3.1 at the time, it was a pretty rough environment. I didn’t like that you could interact with Windows only via a mouse; there was no command line. I preferred working at the command line. So I was understandably distressed in 1994 when I read via various tech magazines that Microsoft planned to eliminate MS-DOS with the next version of Windows. I decided that if the next evolution of Windows was going to be anything like Windows 3.1, I wanted nothing to do with it… I decided to create my own version of DOS. And on June 29, 1994, I posted an announcement to a discussion group… Our “PD-DOS” project (for “Public Domain DOS”) quickly grew into FreeDOS. And 23 years later, FreeDOS is still going strong! Today, many people around the world install FreeDOS to play classic DOS games, run legacy business software or develop embedded systems…
FreeDOS has become a modern DOS, due to the large number of developers that continue to work on it. You can download the FreeDOS 1.2 distribution and immediately start coding in C, Assembly, Pascal, BASIC or a number of other software development languages. The standard FreeDOS editor is quite nice, or you can select from more than 15 different editors, all included in the distribution. You can browse websites with the Dillo graphical web browser, or do it “old school” via the Lynx text-mode web browser. And for those who just want to play some great DOS games, you can try adventure games like Nethack or Beyond the Titanic, arcade games like Wing and Paku Paku, flight simulators, card games and a bunch of other genres of DOS games.
On his “Open Source Software and Usability” blog, Jim says he’s been involved with open source software “since before anyone coined the term ‘open source’,” and first installed Linux on his home PC in 1993. Over on the project’s blog, he’s also sharing appreciative stories from FreeDOS users and from people involved with maintaining it (including memories of early 1980s computers like the Sinclair ZX80, the Atari 800XL and the Coleco Adam). Any Slashdot readers have their own fond memories to share?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.