FreeDOS puts out first new version in six years
-
Nearly six years after its last release, FreeDOS 1.3 came out at the weekend… in case you're feeling nostalgic for a 1980s enterprise-grade OS.
In case you want to party like it's 1989
"FreeDOS 1.3 not only runs Doom, it includes a copy."
-
Nearly six years after its last release, FreeDOS 1.3 came out at the weekend… in case you're feeling nostalgic for a 1980s enterprise-grade OS.
In case you want to party like it's 1989
"FreeDOS 1.3 not only runs Doom, it includes a copy."
Last time I tried to install MS-DOS 6.22 on a reasonably modern PC, it failed. The article writer ran in a VirtualBox; I'd like to run it on bare metal. Has anyone succeeded in doing that? My current PC isn't 'the latest and greatest', an i7-5820K which is too fancy for MS-DOS 6.22. Why? The reason why I tried a couple years back was that I still remember some of those applications having some nice UI features, much due to their simplicity. Even being full screen oriented, they could fully be operated from the keyboard in an efficient, intuitive way. One of those that comes to mind is Norton Commander, but my old floppy box hold a number of others. The Brief editor, responsible for me holding onto DOS until I learned about Notepad++, which is great, but has grown to a complexity approaching gcc and MS Word ... I was making Windows clones of a few old DOS utilities, and wanted to check what I had forgotten - not the least, in the area of simplicity! I was hoping to run "the real thing" for a direct comparison, but MS-DOS failed me. Will FreeDOS do - and will it be able to run all my old DOS apps? (I do have a floppy disk reader for the USB port!) It would of course be fascinating to see the performance of DOS apps running directly on today's metal, but I consider this a bonus feature, not the main thing. Why not VirtualBox? I have had too many bad experiences with virtualization ... I could use VirtualBox, but prefer bare metal. Replacing my Windows boot disk with a DOS one is straightforward.
-
Last time I tried to install MS-DOS 6.22 on a reasonably modern PC, it failed. The article writer ran in a VirtualBox; I'd like to run it on bare metal. Has anyone succeeded in doing that? My current PC isn't 'the latest and greatest', an i7-5820K which is too fancy for MS-DOS 6.22. Why? The reason why I tried a couple years back was that I still remember some of those applications having some nice UI features, much due to their simplicity. Even being full screen oriented, they could fully be operated from the keyboard in an efficient, intuitive way. One of those that comes to mind is Norton Commander, but my old floppy box hold a number of others. The Brief editor, responsible for me holding onto DOS until I learned about Notepad++, which is great, but has grown to a complexity approaching gcc and MS Word ... I was making Windows clones of a few old DOS utilities, and wanted to check what I had forgotten - not the least, in the area of simplicity! I was hoping to run "the real thing" for a direct comparison, but MS-DOS failed me. Will FreeDOS do - and will it be able to run all my old DOS apps? (I do have a floppy disk reader for the USB port!) It would of course be fascinating to see the performance of DOS apps running directly on today's metal, but I consider this a bonus feature, not the main thing. Why not VirtualBox? I have had too many bad experiences with virtualization ... I could use VirtualBox, but prefer bare metal. Replacing my Windows boot disk with a DOS one is straightforward.
VS Code seems to be hitting, for me, the same sweet spot as Brief used to back in the day.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." Alan Kay.
-
VS Code seems to be hitting, for me, the same sweet spot as Brief used to back in the day.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." Alan Kay.
Nothing in the direction of "simplicity" points towards VSCode. I tried to work, with VSCode for a period, to see what those workmates of mine, who really detested anything non-Linux, were working with - their way to 'prove' that they were not Linux affectionados, since they did not not demand command line vi for 7bit ASCII as their sole editing tool. It took me only a couple of weeks to strike the 'Code' part off and go back to a decent environment. If you want that complexity, you might as well accept the support to manage it. VSCode provides a full complement of mechanisms that you can use to prove your competence as a super-developer, proven by your perfect mastery of your tools. Of which VSCode is an essential one. I never saw any good reason for MS to push VSCode other than to attract Linux coders that have grown up with vi as The Editing Tool. Well, let me add those who grew up with emacs as The Operating System. But let's admit it: While emacs is a fairly decent OS (as long as CLI is Your Thing), it lacks a decent editor. Maybe VSCode can fill that void.