I was fortunate enough for my early years to be in the DOS era (albeit near its
end) and I still remember the tiny pang of sadness upon reading that Microsoft
was phasing out the venerable platform.
My first computer was an IBM PC/XT with DOS 3.something, which was a
hand-me-down from my uncle after the university at which he works decided to
dispose of it. Years later, I graduated to another hand-me-down; a Packard Bell
486 machine with a mind-blowing 4 megs of RAM running DOS 6.22 and Windows
3.11, obtained from a friend at church. Both machines were a fascinating
learning experience, teaching me the ins and outs of "The DOS Way" and they
were my first exposure to programming, first in QBASIC, then Microsoft's Visual
BASIC for DOS, then eventually Bob Zale's Power BASIC. I've since moved on to
Assembly, C, and JavaScript for the occasional day-job coding I need to perform
- [Dijkstra's quote be darned
(lol)](https://programmingisterrible.com/post/40132515169/dijkstra-basic) - but
BASIC is still a faithful favorite. Some of my work has involved the machine
tool industry, which has many CNC operators still using DOS-based PLC controls
to this day. When an aging PC gives up the ghost on a vertical turret lathe
valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the ability to quickly set up a
new replacement system complete with FreeDOS and a small collection of utility
programs to get the client up and running is invaluable. Additionally, I still
occasionally use DOS personally because, despite all the "advances" coming out
of Redmond, I find Windows offerings way too bloaty and chock full of
training-wheels design - both of which I detest. Even Linux, as enlightened as
it is, pales in comparison to the speed, efficiency, small size, and sheer
customizibility of FreeDOS.
In short, (Free)DOS is everything an OS should be. It puts power in the user's
hands to control their machine however they wish. It remembers that the owner
of the computer is the user - not the OS.
Kudos to Jim et al. for their work on this great platform!
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‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Wednesday, April 14, 2021 11:59 AM, Johnpaul Humphrey jpth1...@gmail.com
wrote:
> In light of the "DOS was dead" discussion, I wanted to ask a question.
> I was born after support was dropped for MS-DOS, so I can't claim
> nostalgia as my reason for use. Recently I installed FreeDOS on my
> modern HP-Pavilion laptop, alongside BSD, Linux, and plan9. I did this
> because I like DOS's speed and assembly programming.
> It worked fine after I fixed the beep bug with your help.
> So my question is, why do YOU use FreeDOS?
> Is it primarily nostalgia? Legacy program support? Speed?
> Note that I don't consider running legacy software a bad reason. I was
> shocked by how much good software has been "thrown away" because of
> its age. On Linux all my favorite software (vi, siag office, twm,
> motif &c.) was written before I was born. However, that is not my
> primary reason for using FreeDOS. my primary reason is because it is
> like the motorcycle of operating systems. It is lightweight, has no
> red tape to cut through to do things, and is monotasking. (Monotasking
> is also why I don't use it as much as I would like to, but why I use
> it at all.)
> I figured that if I had a different reason than what everybody
> assumes, that some of you might as well. Everyone seems to assume that
> DOS is used by people who are unable to cope with progress and have to
> run their ancient version of word perfect. If that is your reason, it
> is not a bad reason. I was thinking of eventually writing a 64-bit dos
> work [sort of] alike eventually, but it would not be able to support
> legacy programs due to segment offset addressing and a million other
> things.
> Freedos-user mailing list
> Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
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