Hi, On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 7:20 PM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > I disagree about FreeDOS being "not ready yet" or "no advantage to MS DOS".
If you already have the original gold standard of DOSes, i.e. MS-DOS (which was widely tested and hugely popular, by far the most ubiquitous DOS), then you don't urgently "need" any other DOS clone at all, period. Various DOS clones exist, and they all have minor advantages, but overall they work the same (no extra APIs offered, no utilizing newer advanced cpu features). For common DOS software (and loadable drivers), they all behave effectively the same (more or less) on any decent DOS kernel. Reasons not to use MS-DOS? It's unsupported and proprietary and harder to find. Reasons not to use FreeDOS? You just want to run the exact same software that already runs perfectly on your current MS-DOS install. Heck, apparently there are still people using TAWK, which is (apparently) proprietary and long dead. One guy was complaining that GAWK (aka, GPL) still doesn't 100% equal TAWK features despite being 20 years newer. Sound familiar? Old habits die hard. (In hindsight, it's best to not write proprietary, non-standard, unportable software at all, if you have a choice. Although nothing lasts forever, not even standards, it does certainly help to try to be portable/cross-platform from the start.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
