The old PC-MOS was released under the GNU GPL this Summer. From Wikipedia:
PC-MOS/386 was a multi-user, computer multitasking operating system produced by The Software Link (TSL), announced at COMDEX in November 1986 for February 1987 release.[1] PC-MOS/386, a successor to PC-MOS, can run many MS-DOS software titles on the host machine or a terminal connected to it. Unlike MS-DOS, PC-MOS/386 is optimized for the Intel 80386 processor; however early versions will run on any x86 computer.
The GitHub project includes a 1.44MB disk image for the latest version that will work under VirtualBox, but does not include older versions of the operating system from before it required an 80386+. The system won’t work properly if you set a modern date at the boot up prompt.
Thats the obvious querstions.
On an 386+ computer, is there PC-MOS 386 or FreeDOS more compatible to MS-DOS and can run more MS-DOS programs?
Existing parts in PC-MOS 386, which can be helpful for FreeDOS, so that FreeDOS can port it to 16bit and using it for an upcomming FreeDOS?
But the second question presuppose developers who still working active on FreeDOS.
But a look at
http://freedos.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/freedos/
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/svn/HEAD/tree/
seems, that the last activity was on May 12th, 2016.
And how helpful could be the code for DOSBox?
Does anyone still actually travel in the wastelands of DOS? For *practical reasons*, not nostalgia or arcaheology (even I still have a bunch of old-time fave-games encapsulated in DOSbox somewhere, but haven’t fired any of them up in the current decade I think). If so, what do You do there? How do You cope without networking (or, rather, how does one get networked in DOS these days, serial port to a Raspberry Pi? ), LNGFLNMS.DOC or multitasking?
I’m sure there have been articles about it during the course of time, if somebody would have a link to a recent one, that’d probably do the job.
But still, oldtimers, what is still keeping You there?
I haven’t used DOS in decades, but network support is not that complicated. Just load a packet driver for your network card. No serial port required, just a network card which has a driver. That might be tricky for recent hardware… but for some older PCI cards, even some released way in the Windows era, there are packet drivers, such as the Davicom 9102 (not 100% sure about the number, at least it was a Davicom chipset)
Regarding multi tasking, I recall DR-DOS 6.0 came with some task switching software.
FreeDOS has long file name support. Provided the application has support, this will work.
There are lots of single-purpose systems running legacy software on FreeDOS.
It’s still very common in PoS systems, for example, even in major retail and restaurant chains (Or, perhaps especially in major retail and restaurant chains)
Legacy software doesn’t just stop working because its old. And, yes, DOS has TCP/IP available for it. WatTCP is free. Trumpet is available commercially. It isn’t free like WatTcp, but does support IPv6.
But, no, nobody is using it as a desktop OS.
There were plenty of ethernet cards (e.g. 3COM509B) in those days. A bit alien to modern eyes but serviceable at 10 megabit.
My 80486 multitasks with OpenBSD tho’ the 80386 is no longer supported.
Of course, it is all KIPS rather than MIPS. Do I use it in anger, ummm no, but it is a lot younger than the Morris Minor that we do use regularly.
Why bother with 10MBit? I’ve got a 133MHz retro-gaming PC which dual-boots DOS622/Win311 and Win98SE and it’s got packet drivers for a 100MBit PCI NIC.
In fact, I’d have used one of my Intel PRO 1000 cards just for the built-in PXE boot support, but the motherboard seems to be PCI 1.0 and can’t boot with my old Voodoo 3 3000 PCI installed either.
This page has a surprisingly comprehensive collection of DOS packet drivers on offer. (Especially when you consider that some, like the Realtek RTL8139, are chips used across wide swathes of cards.)
http://www.georgpotthast.de/sioux/packet.htm
I paired it with a DHCP client, NTP client, and SSH2DOS from FreeDOS to automate keeping the clock in sync and avoid having to re-burn a DVD-RW every time I want to copy over a new piece of nostalgic shareware.
Throw in some other stuff offered with FreeDOS, like UIDE, SHSUCDX, 4DOS, ANSIPLUS, and so on, and you can get a surprisingly Linux-like DOS experience while still having a ton of conventional memory free.
(In my case, 617K with over 30K upper memory still free for future TSRs with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups’s bloated networking helpers permanently resident and without having to resort to QEMM or anything else proprietary beyond DOS and Win3.11 themselves.)
P.S. UIDE+SHSUCDX instead of OAKCDROM+MSCDEX gives you support for DVD-sized ISO9660 filesystems.
Edited 2017-10-23 18:04 UTC
Lucky you. The key phrase being “PCI” which was quite a late arrival on motherboards and miraculously solved the irritation of configuring ISA cards to avoid conflicts, whilst also offering far higher data rates.
There weren’t so many 100MBit network cards on the ISA buss or even VL-ISA busses. I don’t recall any.
Added to which those machines didn’t pump data fast enough to worry about such distinctions too much.
Fair enough. I’ve had a history of being lucky about receiving secondhand hardware that jumped on the PCI bandwagon early, so that’s probably skewed my perception of what’s out there.
As for the NICs, If I’m remembering my specs correctly, the reason you didn’t see 100MBit ISA NICs was because the ISA bus itself was limited to quite a bit less than 100MBit. (Which would be a secondary reason the machines weren’t capable of pumping data fast enough as you said.)
Edited 2017-10-25 21:34 UTC
This brings back some memories. I knew people who were doing serious work with PC-MOS. The 386 was brand new, untapped potential for real multitasking, and taking advantage of it with industry standard software was a new frontier.
They literally used disassemblers, repurposed CHASM for the 8086 to make it generate 80386 32-bit code, and at times even used hex editors to make significant performance patches. I watched them do it. It blew my mind that they tracked down code out of a mass of hexadecimal, and I don’t know if their work was ever merged with the main code. They were the people that inspired me to want to code to begin with, though, and that’s why.