DeviceLogics said that it bought DR-DOS from the Canopy Group and will upgrade it in Spring 2003 with version 8.0. Read the report at TheInquirer.
New Owners of DR-DOS Promise a New Version by Spring 2003
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I have heard about DR-DOS before, isn’t is some sort of multi-user DOS environment?
Who actually uses it though? This isn’t a troll – I am honestly interested in what market this is aimed at, and used in!
Andrew McCall
No, it was a competitor for MS-DOS and PC-DOS back in the DOS days. It was superior in many ways but due to the rise of Windows 95+ and the infamous incident with Win 3.1 refusing to run on it, it faltered.
I would expect it to be used in embedded applications, possibly kiosk applications due to its size and simplicity. And its extremely reliable with a controlled set of applications (i.e. no user installable applications)
DOS (one version or another) was the Operating System a lot of us started with. Nice to see it’s still alive an under active development 🙂
I’ve used DR-DOS 7.02 and 7.03, and Windows 3.1 runs fine on it, although I understand that Microsoft included code in their installation program to detect DR-DOS and warn the user that there *might* be problems with it running on anything other than MS-DOS. But like I said, I’ve never encountered any such problems.
Win 3.1 ran on DR-DOS, Win 3.11 didn’t
DrDos was the first OS I used and it was great. At the time I was completely unaware of Microsoft’s monopolistic tendencys and assumed that DrDos, MsDos, and the others were no different than the choices available with any other product.
Later on I tried the versions from Caldera and found them to also be way ahead of the crap from Redmond. If you need a decent command line OS DrDos is great.
“I understand that Microsoft included code in their installation program to detect DR-DOS and warn the user that there *might* be problems with it running on anything other than MS-DOS.”
This was only true of the beta version of Windows 3.1. Microsoft got caught on it though. Turns out what they did was intentionally place code in Windows 3.1 so that it wouldn’t run correctly under non-Microsoft versions of DOS. The beta testers complained and the “incomptible” code was removed from the released version of Windows 3.1
Never used Partition Magic but some 2 floppy version seems to be based on on DR-DOS (according to boot message).
The SeaTools from Seagate (software to check your hard disc) also runs on DR-DOS.
I think a new DR-DOS version is good for such vendors. I guess Microsoft no longer supports MS-DOS.
Running a 233 intel with dr-dos 7.03b, it’s not bad at all, it has experiemental 32 bit kernel code, so you should expect a fully operational dos-32 system soon. I run Mos on it(a gui, and a pascal gui builder). DO expect a dos 64 at some time in the near future. The only thing about dos is that it’s basically a scandisk and defrag fs affair. That might change, or maybe not(as all fs’s do fragment, even if just a bit, and unix has fsck’s for fs checking either rate). I am glad to see continued development on the Digital Reasearch tree of Dos. It wasn’t designed like QDOS(later, MSDOS), which is broken and spastic.
Who uses DOS? Plenty. Heck I saw one client who still had a i80286 with 3 megs RAM happily running Msft OS/2 1.2! If I remember, it was running the telephones. You would be surprised what you are going to find out there.
Some thoughts on DOS uses…
1) a REAL thin client – only browser and email program (is WebSpyder still being developed? At least Arachne is still there)
2) a small footprint embedded system
3) an X terminal – hope somebody open sources Xappeal or DV/X, or even creates an open sourced X for DOS.
and so on
I thought Caldera had released DR-Dos 7 as freeware (free for personal use) ? I hope this won’t affect the litterally dozens of DR-Dos users out there 😉
I may be mistaken but I’d thought that Caldera had also realesed the source code to OpenDos ( or DrDos) 7.02.
I thought I had downloaded it several years ago but a hard drive failure ate 8 Gigs of primo data.
If anyone knows where I can get it again ( or has a copy), let me know at bannor99AtHotmailDotCom ( or in this forum, if that suits you)
I’d forgotten about that ! Found openDos (with source) here: http://www.drdos.net/download.htm
If DRDOS supports Multitasking it could be quite useful to run the free Mac Emulator Fusion PC and also an Atari emulator and switch from Atari to Mac if needed.
This way you have a modern and simple Operating System for Intel/AMD-PC’s which I have not seen yet.
But where can you get DRDOS for cheap or free?
Caldera gave it away with their Open Linux Beta CD on the Cebit 2001, but I don’t now extract a bootable DOS from the CD.
regards, Ludwig
I get lots of hits at my page at http://pcgem.iwarp.com which has GUI’s for DOS that look almost as modern as Windows. Obelix mentioned Mos, if that’s the “Millenium Operating System” GUI I’d sure like to know it’s current status. And I hope WebSpyder get’s updated. I can’t get the most recent version to dial out, it won’t let me enter ISP details in the relevent boxes, and I either lost or overwrote the older demo. If anyone has the early self-booting demo please have a heart and donate it for my web page so others can have it. Ditto for working copies of WebBoy or web-ready Java Virtual Machine for DOS that has netscape ready-to-go.
Anonymous: Win 3.1 ran on DR-DOS, Win 3.11 didn’t
I certainly never could get Win 3.1 to load on DR-DOS. I ended up moving specific pieces of DR-DOS over to MSDOS 5.0 to retain some of its functionality. I even got the stacker data compression that came with DR-DOS to work with MSDOS 5.0. I also used some of DR-DOS’s memory tools to free up more of the prescious < 640K memory under MSDOS 5.0.
Well as long as we are talking about Dos you can get abandonware at:
http://www.abandonwarering.com/
http://www.flashback-aw.net
I used DR-DOS 7.02 and Windows 3.1 for a year or more at the same time I was running OS/2 Warp3 and Caldera 1.3, I think it was on my Cyrix 6x68L-150. NO PROBLEMS with Win3.1 whatsoever. The inability to run Win3.x was programmed into the beta of 3.whatever, but taken out of the production version, or taken out of version 3.1.
Fight the disinformation, fight the FUD………..