“Most modern operating systems are better than FreeDOS when considered by any objective criteria. FreeDOS doesn’t multitask, doesn’t surf the Internet easily, isn’t great for multimedia productions, and doesn’t even do Windows. But I love it anyway”, says Lee A. Spain in his review of FreeDOS.
My workstation OS: FreeDOS
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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or whatever they used to run on the Atari ST….or if he really wants to go old school he can try NetBSD.
I fully confess that I have a 486 laptop lurking in my closet. It still runs MS-Dos and Windows 3.1. I still take it out from time to time and have fun “old skool” style.
Despite the fact that I don’t like the CLI, I have a certain amount of affection for DOS.
The most commonly used commands are fairly straight forward and simple. It’s stable. It boots wicked fast. And if you only want to do a few simple office tasks, it’s awesome.
What about networking, which browser is he running? Does the GNU toolchain support FreeDOS
Well, you could probably use DJGPP (DOS version of the GNU toolchain).
This man is mad
Where are the screenshots?
There are some, but it’s not eyecandy (if that’s what you’re expecting). Check Google image.
Give me a break. Everyone knows that Apple’s System 6 for the Macintosh is the future of computing. Word 5.1 and Excel 4.0 is lightyears beyond WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3. I mean think about it: you cannot even see what the final output will be without switching into a separate preview mode. Not only that, but you don’t need your over priced 486 to do your work on. Yeap, this software will chug along just fine on an 8 MHz 68000 and be more user friendly and graphics intensive to boot. Those compact Macs are a lot more cute too. (My mother adores it!) And if you have to do graphics work, nothing beats a Macintosh II with a 24-bit high resolution graphics adapter. I would love to see your 486 surpass the Macintosh’s graphics capabilities!
😉
c:>
🙂
> Give me a break. Everyone knows that Apple’s System 6 for the Macintosh is the future of computing.
Yep, but System 6 is not used in many and many embedded SDK
It’s strange, but for embedded market DOS is one of the OS of the… future.
why is it when i see the headline “My Workstation OS” its always the most ridiculous OS at that. They should add a qualifier to the headline for lets say “developing firmware” or “data recovery”.
OMG look at those screen shots!!!!
Such high res, snap to grid, 48bit color 1920×1880 resolution 3D, intuitive icons on the “quickstart” menu!!!!
Such anti-aliased, sans-whocares,120dpi, 3d fonts!!!
It has none of that, and yet it still works fast on hold hardware. Who’da thunk it.
The poor bastard child of *nix (IOW, use Linux if you like a CLI so much…)
Why are you guys so intollerant? I think it’s great! I personally prefer something else. But from time to time even I turn back to my old familiar environment. The Amiga that is 🙂
I remember, we used to kick MS-DOS users butts a long time ago 🙂
Sigh… those were times *caugh* anyway, I tried FreeDOS myself, it has a lot of improvements over MS-DOS, and yes, there is a Browser for it. Although I forgot its name 🙂
And it runs UAE for DOS very well 😛
cheers
DOS was one of the simplest OS I’ve ever seen. No multitasking, no thread synchronization hassles, no giant API to get your head around. DOS was basically a boot loader, a bunch of interrupt handlers and the COMMAND.COM shell. It’s simplicity was probably the reason why it was so stable. I’ve never seen DOS crash, ever!
“I’ve never seen DOS crash, ever!”
You saw DOS crash every time Windows 3.x/9x crashed. Which was OFTEN.
no, you saw windows 3.x/9.x crash.
brings back memorys of constant editing of autoexec.bat and config.sys so that you have as much resources as you could find…
these days one may as well use say bash on a *nix, multitasking, real networking support and you can even browse proper webpages useing links or similar
man i wish i had stated my computeing on a *nix…
Hobgoblin read my mind – “man i wish i had started my computing on a *nix…”
If only. If I was learning bash scripting and Unix OS system admin back in those days instead of DOS and Windows I would be a luckier man.
But if my first experiences were on a Mac? (Shudder) No comment.
Amen. Well said.
Right tool for the right job–but, as you mention, this isn’t 1985. Making the computer do the work, instead of me, is supposed to be the roles of man and machine. I don’t see any reason to not move on when it comes to an OS.
Just the other day I came across my disc of OS/2 Warp from 94, and thought, should I? Quickly reality stepped in and I put the disc back.
iGZo
man i wish i had stated my computeing on a *nix
I probably would have run screaming away from computers and become a luddite if my introduction to computers was on *nix instead of DOS. I think DOS best exemplifies the spirit of ‘Operating Systems just get in your way, only applications matter.’ I’d call DOS an anti-OS.
I set up a DOS box using DR-DOS 7.02. I was able to surf the net using DOS based packet driver for my either net card, play CDs, mp3s, oggs, avis, and mpegs with all DOS based applications. The browser of choice is Arachne, it has a integrated desktop, e-mail client and graphical web browser. Sure it was slow but it was ultra geeky, and it didn’t do too shabby on a 233 with 64 megs of ram.
The poor bastard child of *nix (IOW, use Linux if you like a CLI so much…)
wrong, it’s the bastard child of CP/M.
I have DOS installed on a small partition on my laptop. It’s really great if you want to make a few notes. Boots in a few seconds and “edit” some text! I have a lot of system restore tools on my dos partition, like the microsoft checkdisk for ntfs to repair my windows xp partition if necessary. Just in case. And I have a linux loader for my Linux partition. I have good experiences with a small DOS partition on my systems!!!
I’ve never seen DOS crash, ever!
Then you must have been using your computer for small time periods and turning it off when you were done. Which of course is entirely feasible with DOS’s quick boot time, but DOS does certainly crash.
When I was really young I used to “program” with QBasic on top of DOS, make crappy screen savers I thought were cool and stuff like that. I saw plenty of crashes after leaving one of those run for a while and trying to say play return to zork or doom afterwards.
FreeDOS is awesome! I use to run it all the time to play my old DOS games (and to just play around) when I had a the space to spare. But now I just run DosBOX
The space is better put to use in CRUX & NetBSD…
”
This is just lame. What happens when his friend asks him to burn her a cd, or when he wants to talk on AIM/ICQ/Jabber/Whatever, or when he wants to check up on his favorite website? I can understanding holding on to DOS if you just cant get enough of your favorite old games, or if you’re locked into it at work, but to use it as your operating system of choice? PLEASE… An operating system is about getting your work done, whatever OS works best for what you’re trying to do should be fine, alright, I admit this, but what kind of backwater, unproductive work is this guy doing? I can’t imagine working on Perl and Ruby scripts, doing design work in the Gimp, or any of the other hundred things I do at once on the computer if I ran DOS. It’s like the people that hang on to Amiga and BeOS. You might like the snappy interface, or the cool audio hardware that the Amiga had, but I just can’t imagine that you could get any real work done on such out-dated operating systems. What happens when someone hands this guy a cd with a powerpoint presentation on it and asks him to look it over? What does he do when he wants to file his taxes online? I guess this is a troll, fine, but as much as it is, it’s a question: Is this for real? Why would you punish yourself by using 20 year old technology that limits your productivity? And if the only arguement is fond memories and “it’s free” (There are a hundred free operating systems that aren’t subject to the limitations that DOS is), then I really feel sorry for this misguided individual.
”
<sarcasm>
You’re right, this is an outrage! Who in the hell does Lee A. Spain (author of article) think he is, using old technology that suits his needs completely fine! He should be put to death!
</sarcasm>
If you can’t handle the fact that he uses old technology, get some professional help. Maybe some hardcore drugs too (the bad kind)…it will help you to stop having these feelings of anger towards people who choose an inferior OS. Just a recommendation, I would feel bad if I heard on the news that you went on some murder spree killing Free-DOS users to save them from not being able to kill Powerpoints.
God people, get a life.
@ Zork and Doom?
oh yeah.. real brain dead comment there..
@ Kyle
the Atari ST had the cool audio hardware. The amiga had the cool video hardware.. jeez, get your facts straight
I saw plenty of crashes after leaving one of those run for a while and trying to say play return to zork or doom afterwards.
Are you sure it wasn’t the hardware? RAM was a lot flakier in those bad old days(heh). I remember my 386 randomly freezing up on me. It turned out that the motherboard was bad.
brings back memorys of constant editing of autoexec.bat and config.sys so that you have as much resources as you could find
That’s not a problem with DOS. It is a problem with the architecture it ran on. As for managing resources: you should try to get Unix running in a 1 MB address space, where a huge chunk of that address space may be mapped to hardware in unpredictable ways. (Maybe minix?)
Why would you punish yourself by using 20 year old technology that limits your productivity?
Limit productivity? Read The Trouble with Computers by Landauer. He spends a lot of time detailing, with actual empirical research, that efficiency had not really improved prior to the mid-1990s (when the book was written). Web browsing or burning CDs or yacking via MSN Messenger doesn’t necessarily improve productivity. They just solve problems which computers themself created.
It’s like the people that hang on to Amiga and BeOS. You might like the
snappy interface, or the cool audio hardware that the Amiga had, but I just can’t imagine that you could get any real work done on such out-dated operating systems.
So it’s the Operating System’s fault that you lack imagination? Interesting.
Amiga did have cool audio. The first time I heard the Bach-Gounod version of Ave Maria was in an Amiga demo, and that wasn’t even a particularly good demo. I think it was an AmigaBASIC demo. The fact that Atari ST had hot audio when it came out a year later doesn’t negate Amiga’s fantastic audio.
I also remember DOS crashes. It may not have happened often (I avoided DOS like the plague) but considering the fact that DOS didn’t do much of anything, it was pretty annoying.
The Amiga crashed too, and often (especially when I was learning to program), but at least AmigaOS did things.
Interesting article but it feels very incomplete. I could sum it all up in one sentence:
“FreeDOS is a free, DOS-like OS which I run on some old hardware I got from a thrift shop and I play old games on it.”
If it’s a “Workstation” tell us what apps you use to accomplish different tasks assosiated with a “workstation”? Checking e-mail, browsing (text-mode in this case), typing up reports or essays on a word-processor etc. And how about some screenshots to help people see what the applications available look like.
Some years ago (i suppose it was 1994-1995) i successfully used DOS (not FreeDOS but it should work the same) to connect to the internet. Years passed so i dont remember all the names, btw i had on my system:
-a TCP/IP stack and PPP connection (modem 33.6k)
-a graphical browser (Arachne) and a textual browser
-an ftp CLI client (maybe integrated in the tcp/ip stack?)
-a multi-window IRC client with borland-style interface (pretty good, i always wanted to have the sources to do some modifications)
so it’s not so difficult to use DOS on the net
mojo (IP: —.vc.shawcable.net) wrote:
browsing (text-mode in this case)
There actually is a graphical web browser written specifically for DOS called Arachne, and it’s pretty good all things considered. You can find it here:
http://home.arachne.cz/
There is also a 32-bit GUI desktop environment for DOS called SEAL. It is on the FreeDOS installation CD, and with some tweaking you can get it to run on MS-DOS. It’s a long way from production-ready, but it’s very neat nonetheless.
it’s a funny joke, that’s all
Using “vi” as your workstation word processor?
Regarding the article, don’t forget you can get a windowing system for FreeDOS, I remember a particular one but I forgot the name of it. I think at version 2 they needed to “re-write” the entire windowing system and I don’t know what happened next.
I think the people here who don’t like DOS have no clue what DOS is. They’ve only been exposed to joys of the GUI, and never had to live in the world of a CLI.
I still have a strong affection for DOS, even after all these years. Heck, I ran DOS as my main OS until 1999! I rarely started Windows 3.1, because I could do everything I needed in DOS.
Yes, that includes surfing the web, sending email, ftp, chatting. and tons of other things. And btw, you can burn CDs from DOS!
DOS is an amazing OS, it’s amazing because of its simplicity. And you can be productive on a DOS system. Heck, people were productive on DOS throughout the 80’s and well into the 90’s!
I even have a DOS partition on my 2 Ghz Athlon, why? Because a computer just doesn’t feel right unless I can still boot into DOS.
And FreeDOS is a wonderful project! I’ve been following it for years now. It’s definitely come a long way, and I know I’m looking forward to FreeDOS 1.0
Long live DOS!
“wrong, it’s the bastard child of CP/M.”
Of course, literally speaking. 🙂 I was speaking figuratively – DOS was/is a pale (what an understatement) imitaion, conceptually speaking, of CLI *nix.
I have seen a DOS based sytem for dentists in action recently. On reasonably modern hardware it is lightning fast. No GUI to distract either.
I remember back in the mid 90s using WordPerfect 5.1 on a 486DX. It would boot so quickly (2-3 secs) that the boot messages were unreadable.
I moved my last remaining dozen-or-so favorite DOS programs to Linux a few years ago – they all run fine under a Linux program called “Dosbox”. Favorites being a space invaders game identical to the original arcade (the readme file is dated 1978), PACMAN, MSPACMAN, and a CMOS backup utility.
I thought freeDOS was 16 bit?
I use old operating systems a lot, simply because the do have a few things to offer over the recent stuff. Almost all of the recent stuff is Windows or Unix based. Developers were much more creative in the past! (Of course, I’m ignoring the hobby and research operating systems because very little software exists for those.) But there are two big problems:
They usually don’t support new features on new hardware. This means that you will never see the true performance gain modern hardware has to offer. Worse yet, the new hardware can be incompatible, making it impossible to run the new OS (this is particularly true on the Mac side).
There is very little software being produced for the old operating systems. Yes, some people are doing it but I’ve found that most of the stuff which is generally available is software to access the internet. Wouldn’t it be great though if DOS or Macintosh System 7 had something to view, even edit, modern Word and Acrobat files!
one where one have multiple virtual terminals but only need to log in ones. where you can fire up something in one vterm and then get feedback in the other about it being done. so that you can say run a ftp download in one term, jump to a diffrent one and get a small indiactor about the completion in there. maybe best if one have maybe one line on top indicateing active terms and some inicator or other if its occupied or available. then you could maybe fire up a desktop on any of them and there again fire up gui apps (hell maybe use a diffrent term to start the gui app and redirect it to term of choice). a simpler form of linux in a way. unless you loaded the network douring boot it didnt start. and you should have only one file to edit to alter what starts or not and in what chain it start. maybe what i want is similar to slack? i dont know. but i do know that i want the ability to strip the os down to just a command interpeter and a kernel back. you cant even do that in linux in a clean way…
Some of what you want can be done with gnuscreen, and it also supports being closed and logging out then resuming your still running processes later.
What you speak of is far above Operating Systems, you’re asking for an interface.
I’ve been “living in 1985” for the last few months
I routinely work with DRDOS and MSDOS on embedded controllers for machining centers. While it is stable as hell, most people are looking for integrated production solutions leading corporations to look to machining centers with NT based controllerd.
I don’t mind working in DOS though, except for the routine requests I have had for networking it….Networking can be a nightmare.
I remember programming for foxpro (not yet for windows). For a bussiness application of a small database, I cannot see why you would want something more graphic. Nearly no startup times. dirt cheap.
I started off on CP/M. DOS was just beautiful in comparison, I loved it. It even had a built-in COPY command, not like CP/M’s “PIP destination=source”. (Derived from some DEC minicomputer CLI.) And then of course, DR-DOS was beautiful compared to MS-DOS.
It’s interesting that some people still use DOS. Good luck to ’em, but I think Linux and the BSD’s are the places to go for a CLI these days.
I bet you can run Arachne 1.70 on top of FreeDOS. Here’s a page where you can get a menu for it (works on MSDOS, anyway), and modify it for Arachne. You can do without the menu, and just run arachne like so: (once you install it)
C:> cd arachne
arachne
—
Hereis the url:
http://www.angelfire.com/ms/telegram/menu.html
Arachne installs from a floppy, so you download it from the arachne site (see link on menu.html), and place it on the floppy. Support for Arachne ended a few years ago, but it still works well on top of MSDOS, Caldera Opendos, and probably on top of FreeDOS.
—
— Rapidweather.
can gnuscreen be set as the default terminal or do i have to run it in bash first?
yes i may be asking for something outside of a os. but still, most people cant tell where to os stops and the interface begins…
hmm, can gnuscreen support framebuffer? so that i can use it to run a framebuffer app and then use gnuscreens internal switching to change to a terminal prompt with the framebuffer app running in the background…
….make a great combination. I too have “just had to” get a dos system running on my PC, with ARACHNE for a browser.
It was just soooo damned cool. If they went to a multi-tasking DOS, I think the world might beat a path to their door. There are still many proprietary business apps running in DOS windows out there.
When my wife was in the hospital having our most recent child, they are still running a DOS-based application to monitor mother and baby vital signs, on what looked to be a 386 or 486 cpu.
Haven’t you DOS-bashers figured anything yet about the article? It’s about someone being in love. You know, LOVE? The thing that makes you feel good? This guy is in love with FreeDOS and wanted to make you understand that you should stop bitching about what OS _other_ people should use, and instead focus on what OS _you_ should use.
Just stop telling the guy that you know better than him what’s good for him.
> FreeDOS doesn’t multitask, doesn’t surf the Internet easily, isn’t great for multimedia productions …
Just sounds great, doesn’t it? 😉
DN is still available
http://www.ritlabs.com/download/dn/dn151.zip
This provides an file manager for any DOS system, very similar to Midnight Commander.
If you RTFA and are asking : “Why ?” you’re obviously reading the wrong website.
I’ve personally had great fun with FreeDos. Never having used the original dos (I’m not counting the amigaDos), it was interesting to set up a FreeDos partition and to try to get it online. As usual OS-News loaded up fine in Arachne, this site must be about the most cross platform, cross browser compatible site ever !
Oh and I still use FreeDos as a rescue ‘disk’ (it boots from my usb key) today. It can still do a lot od useful stuff : learn to program using dosbox and the now freely available turboC or turboPascal for example. Or play around with early gui’s like GEM and DESQview/X.
It’s a geeks playground !
http://pcgem.iwarp.com
DOS’s last stand. All the best GUI’s for DOS that you never knew existed were there, I’ve had to comment out all the best ones as they disappeared from the web. Note, SEAL is NOT there, only os i know that takes longer to boot than Windows. SEAL’s original author later made Qube, and Qube applications ran on either DOS, Windows, or Linux. How cool is that? Him not getting the exposure and acclaim he deserved for pulling that off has led to alternative os’s greatest loss if you ask me.
DOS is a small wonder. Oh yes