Can you give me examples of how you are using FreeDos? I'm interested in knowing what things you can do with it but I'm at a loss except for a retro dos machine ior replacing DOS systems.
@@jackkraken3888There's the embedded space; compliance - such as replacing a version of MS-DOS of questionable provenance with FreeDOS; bootable media; Dell and hp releasing their PCs with FreeDOS instead of Windows (for those who want to install Linux or BSD); bootable media for updating a computer's BIOS and motherboard firmware; disk and system recovery; running unique and very necessary old DOS software, especially in industrial spaces and specific trades.
DOS should be free: it’s a crime that Bill Gates was able to take something that already existed and charge for it. Imagine how much better computing would be if Microsoft had never been!
DOS is a nifty operating system. I credit the fact that I know as much about computing as I do to the fact that I had old computers to play with and experiment with in my formative years. DOS is simple enough that you can basically learn the whole thing in a week or so, but versatile enough to still be useful. Giving a curious young mind the power to know how a complex system works inside and out is a recipe for self education. Unfortunately, today's most common modern computing devices aren't so transparent. With so much of the inner working buried in countless layers of abstraction, they may as well work with magic. You can't play around and see how it works. It's depriving a generation of something great.
Me too, i think i know more than the lay about computers because this i what i had when i was kid to play Doom. It also makes you grow up with a different perspective of what is an OS.
Yes, I fully agree. I also played around with DOS a little bit when I was a teenager (even though at that time I already had WinXP on my PC), and it's probably one of the things that kinda got me a little bit more into programming.
@@HippieInHeart Same here! I love how modular DOS is. I just played about with DOS boot disks -- really a minimal OS consisting of ~5 files. Some DOS boot disks made their own RAMdisk and I remember being able to strip down Windows 3.1 enough to run from a RAMdisk and fit on a single floppy!
Love the historical perspective. I cut my teeth on a Commodore PET and C64, then DOS 3.x, and later Amiga OS 1.3 on an A500. People getting into computing now don't realize how much easier things are today.
Probably the by far best feature added by DOS 6 was the boot menus.. especially as a gamer, you finally could add multiple choices to optimize the sh*t out of your limited base memory, depending on whether a game needs a CD or not, or comes with a DOS extender that doesn't play well with EMM386, etc..
Pretty much how i ran my gaming rigs on xp. I could boot normally into windows or just run the game from boot without the majority of windows even activating. I think i had 3-4 active tasks at the most including the game exe. Now i look at the windows services with utter horror. All 300 active unnecessary 🤦
yep. I remember setting my first one up when I was 12 using a 1000 page DOS manual. all my friends were using boot disks for games or had amigas and I had a goddamn multiboot running. All so I could run Red Baron without swapping disks lol
My favorite thing about DOS is its ability to run in extremely limited environments. And although newer systems added more and more resources (faster CPUs, much more RAM, storage etc), modern OSes have placed so many additional demands on the system that it doesn't _feel_ as fast as DOS was back in the day.
@@zyeborm Yep, I remember finding "The Incredible Machine" (great puzzle game) for DOS for a few bucks and tried to play it on my very modest system (at the time) and it was so fast you couldn't tell what was happening. Luckily I found a small program that slowed down the processor enough so I could play it. Years later I discovered "DosBox" and that made life much easier.
I have a soft spot for DOS. Started with DOS 3.2 and remembered 4.0 which could partition a 40MB IDE hard drive in one partition. Exciting times. One of the things that annoys me with modern computing is that they keep throwing out old paradigms and expect everyone to learn a new bag of tricks, which often are not any better. So good on you for keeping the DOS flame alive. All the best.
friend got a greyish box with a weird monochrome tv on top for christmas '89. we spent the whole night studying manuals, typing cryptic commands, trying to copy our first file onto a 5,25'' floppy. those creaking sounds... precious. DOS will always have a special place in my heart, the first love. thank you for your work!!
WordStar on MS-DOS (on my dad's Compaq) was the program that made me fall back in love with writing as a teenager. I've used many other word processors since then, but there was just something about it that made me want to write. The funky way its default view had a command menu covering half the screen seems absurd in hindsight, but it had the effect of making the program seem trivial to use. Everything you needed to know was right there (unless you hid the menu, which you could).
Don't forget that CP/M had a GUI too, called GEM, graphical environment manager. It shipped at standard with some systems, notably the Amstrad PC1512/1640 in the UK in the mid to late 19800s. I've done a fair bit of programming in the companion product, PL/M, programming language for microprocessors, which was Intel''s standard supported language on its development systems alongside ASM/xx an assembler.
Curious, I thought GEM was first developed for DR-DOS. After a bit of searching, I see DR DOS was a CP/M-86 implementation and MS-DOS compatible, interesting! Still, I don't like GEM very much. In Atari ST form it was my first GUI operating system, and I refreshed my memory of it in recent years with OpenGEM under FreeDOS. In neither case did I find it comfortable to use. The version in Atari's TOS 1.4 ROMs (or was it 1.04,) was improved; you could scroll without losing your selection, but OpenGEM lacks that improvement. OpenGEM does have the improvement of menus only opening on click if you wish. (I think TOS 1.4 had that too, but it was too long ago.) On the ST, the combination of a terrible mouse with my neurological problems meant menus were always jumping into my view! lol But both my health and mouse technology has improved tremendously over the years.
@@eekee6034 Well GEM didn't really have any serious applications for it which made it fairly useless and it wasn't being particularly promoted. I did fire it up out of curiosity and remember looking at some appointments or calendar app but that was about it. It may have also included GEM Paint, not sure. There's a video "The Amstrad PC 1512 Computer with Tom Scott" here on TH-cam. At 15:37 you can see the GEM desktop. This was back in 1986, only a couple of years after the Mac launched, but Apple made sure to make more of a thing about the OS. It was a bit slow too but that could be improved a bit by fitting an NEC V30 CPU instead of the 8086 (it had the genuine 16 bit CPU).
@@grahamstevenson1740 I think it's unfair to say that Gem didn't have any serious applications. I used GEM Writer (or was it called Write?) a lot and it was in my opinion much better than the other WYSIWYG word processors at the time I still miss the fact that you could set it to beep on a spelling mistake, rather than having to go back and look for highlighting or wiggly underlines and the other visual indicator everyone else used. I half agree with you over Paint. GEM Paint was not that different from the contemporary MS Paint.
Without your OS, I would not be able to breathe new live in this old PC i have lying around keeping it from going into the land fill. thank you so much.
Man, it's hard to believe that all this DOS stuff is really ancient history, and little known by most people. My first PC compatible computer was a Packard-Bell 486 in 1994. So I actually missed most of the earlier DOS development, as my computer had MS-DOS 6.0 (which I quickly upgraded to 6.22 and ran Windows For Workgroups 3.11 on top of it. I loved WFW, but I certainly explored everything I could find on the computer, including all the DOS commands and programs. Later on, I played wtih OpenDOS/DR-DOS which had some nifty features to it as well.
I remember DOS... but man I have forgot more about DOS than most people around today even knows about it... Used oodles of hours tinkering with it, optimizing it, trying new stuff... and of course way too much time playing games :D
LOL! I'm a grey-beard (born in 1961 and started programming in 1976) and found this a pretty accurate review of the history of early DOS versions. I have to point out however that many of the DOS 2.x commands were unbelievably braindead. The "more" command being a prime example. In the early 80's I was exposed to Unix and found its "more" command so superior to the DOS version I wrote my own DOS version in assembly so that searching and paging backwards (as well as forwards) worked.
4:20 keep in mind the "Operating system" was a completely separate to whatever allowed you to control/manage a disk drives. Depending on how you booted the computer, it may not be able to access a disk drive, if the drive was powered on AFTER the computer booted, it would be unaware of that peripheral, and you had to reboot again to load data from a drive. Atari 8bit computers were like that, which allowed it to have more RAM free if there was no disk operating system loaded, but it also allowed it use various kinds of DOSes to fit your needs. You could run simple boot-loader menus, that booted FAST and only used a TINY amount of space on the disk to boot, display it's contents and wait for the user to pick something from a menu. Then you had more traditional Atari DOS menu driven allowing you to manage files, but you had to exit out of BASIC to use DOS, and vice versa to just get a directory listing. Then there were command line DOS like SpartaDOS which was very similar to MS-DOS that allowed batch files to run. Yet other computers like Commodores didn't care what powered on first and let you "boot" a floppy disk with a simple command in BASIC, meaning it's "DOS" was always loaded in RAM, even you didn't own a floppy drive. Yet to get a directory listing meant you had to clear whatever BASIC code you had in memory since the directory listing was loaded into memory as a BASIC program, as REM statements. So you were stuck with just one way of interacting with floppy drives, at least until Fast Load carts came into being. These days the OS and disk management is all under one roof now.
Amazing video! Raymond Chen has a blog called "What’s the difference between the COM and EXE extensions?" describing how EXE was separated from COM using undefined operations as a header and not the file extension for backwards compatibility reasons. It's a good read and I can see why you're hesitant in adding new capabilities.
Amazing presentation on the history and background of DOS - as to the 80s and home personal computers I devoured the old Osborne programming books as a teen that made a real effort to make the printed BASIC code be adapted to individual home PC systems. A great time of keying in programs and trying to find your data entry mistakes in so many lines of BASIC programs. lol. Thank you Jim for the ongoing reality of FreeDOS (and kudos to so many people who committed software to this OS). May the history of FreeDOS be long from here.
I have head of FreeDOS, though I have never used it. I am much more likely to now, after seeing this great video. And I have plenty of old hardware (8088, 286, 386, 486 & Pentium) to try it on! Thank you for your efforts keeping this project alive over the decades.
Currently building a retro PC and installed FreeDOS 1.3 on a CF card and it was AMAZING how everything worked instantly, different memory/cpu mode options, mouse, cdrom, even my AWE64 sound card with ~620k free conventional memory. No need for messy config, just install and enjoy my good old games. Awesome work!
Freedos is the reason for my current playing of roguelikes, the IVAN package included in the games lead me into a rabbit hole that ended in Cataclysm DDA, and the wonders of a soothing shot of heroin.
It's great to hear the history that I went thru. I remember the first version of windows was a pain in the neck, trying to get your DOS programs to run in a window. My 1st computer was almost a K-Pro but I went with Leading Personal Computer in 1984, a IBM clone. I had that machine from about 10 years. While I had others as well. A little Correction - The LE came with MSDOS 2.11 with a 10 Mb drive and 5" floppies, which I still have the books for it. Nice history.
"In computing, compatibility beats innovation, every time." (Gene Amdahl?) To this day, there is some compatibility (in a sense) going all the way back to 1981 and that is quite fascinating as well.
@@SenileOtaku GNOME won't change, they were the world leaders in finding ways to force people to upgrade. I lived through that era using Linux full-time. It wasn't fun. :(
4:37 My exactly system I had in 1982, although I had the 8088 coprocessor together with the CPU a 8086 and 384k memory, and that HD had 20Mb drive space. Me was told, from a CEO from IBM, PC-DOS was meant to run, the big concurrent of MS WIN, (I forgot the name), OS/1 (which look the same as WIN, or something? And when you put it on, if everything was ok, you see this.... C:\> _ lol, brings back memories. I forgot a lot commando's, I worked with dbase III and later IV on that machine. I followed MS-DOS till v5.0 I think, and went to Windows from that on. But still worked from the command line, darn, in that 1.0 there wasn't even a xcopy command, well it had its romantics, but now it's even more challenging, keeping the bad boys out of your system. And all the crap on the chats.
I started on Compaq DOS 3.31 and evolved up to MS-DOS 6.22. FreeDOS is a great tool still, and this presentation was a nice trip down memory lane as well. Kudos to everyone involved!
Sigh, command line driven operating systems. DOS, UNIX, running AS400s, those were days when I was a young man with many years ahead of misery ahead of me, but the potential. I miss the way the old systems worked, the BIOS code beeps, using DOS. I don't think I've heard of FreeDOS before but now I need to check it out. Thanks for the good memories that using this will bring back.
If I remember right DOS 4x is when they added much of the myriad of batch commands - which are now considered "magic" commands - How did you do that in a batch program? (I wave my hands) - magic!!! These are commands you now have to look up on stack overflow these days. Things like picking out text in file.... you can do that in a batch?????? Yes, yes you can. I was once told at work that our database program array was too difficult to automate. Our programmers tried and tried but they could not get away from the manual intensive methods of installing a program and then setting it up manually, over about 5 programs that dealt with the database. So I wrote a batch file that did it because I was doing testing on an array of customer database mockups and I identified this manual BS as the biggest time waster. I took a 3 hour process and made it a bit less than 10 minutes. Our programming team could not figure out this batch file, and I had made it with functions and well thought out routines. This was NO spaghetti code!! It was properly structured with error traps and all the bells and whistles a regular program has... about 1900 lines of batch code. Eventually I had to write a white paper on it, as to how it worked because it used such obscure batch commands, no one could figure it out!!! Actually, there was some code in there that I lifted from stack exchange, and I wasn't even sure how it worked, but I knew what it did. Needless to say,, our programmers were none too happy that an engineer did what they said was impossible. Thanks stack exchange!!! couldn't have done it without you!!!!
Definitely the way to do it. We had two scripts, one to create the database and one to update to current. When you wanted to modify the database, you'd never modify it directly but would add the code to the update script and run it. At various intervals, you'd make a new create script and empty out the update script (or just keep it).
There was also DRDOS. I used drdos 6 with some UPDATE if I recall. Superstor maximized disc space with compression. I might still have original diskettes. At work there is still operating one AGFA 135 daylight film splicer with DOS 2.11
You forgot Database applications! First big company i went to work at was during the end of the "diskette" age before hard disks took over, the "trinity" we ran was Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheeting, dNase III for database operations, and Multimate (also distributed by Ashton-Tate) for word processing.
I wrote a menu system for 3.0 that I wish now I had tried to market. I needed to run Ventura Publisher that needed all the bade memory I could give it and my menu system would run other DOS programs and would unload automatically when I needed it to load Ventura. I was pretty proud of that accomplishment.
Thanks for the history of DOS and FreeDOS. I remember running WordStar under CP/M on an Apple ][ computer with the Microsoft Z-80 card. Later I ran it on an IBM PC. You can see how DOS has some of its roots in CP/M when you look at the way the memory at the start of RAM is laid out in both environments. You will find a number of similarities.
Its in active use in retro gaming handhelds, that come preloaded with the dos games. The Hand 386 is around 200 usd, hard to find, but its out there, a handheld dos computer that is made with modern parts
NOTE: DOS 4 Already had an EMM386.SYS , not EMM386.EXE but .sys,yes and EMMXMA.SYS and HIMEM.SYS memory management of some sort appears on DOS 4. The HELP in commands appears in DOS 5 (to compete with DR-DOS 5) which was better at this point than MS-DOS(PC-DOS).
@@eekee6034 The disaster was the unability to put drivers on to UMB or on to XMS or EMS as concerning to the DOS 4 which DR-DOS 5 has taken in account.
I bought a netbook especially for freedos. I always want a dos computer, not virtual machine. And now i have one. And yes, freedos is interesting and deserves some attention
Glad you like using FreeDOS - we think it's pretty cool! I bought a Pocket386 not long ago (see my other video on that) and it's great to run FreeDOS on real hardware. :-)
I don't think it would matter to me what you talked about, you just delivered it so well, I would listen to you rant about cleaning the house for half an hour
If it wasn't for gaming with my cousins occasionally, I'd probably make freeDOS my main OS at home because it does what I need with fewer distractions.
I really love that DOS is still kept alive with such an enthusiasm. However, what I still miss is full support for Windows 3.1 in 386 enhanced mode. I know it's quite a feat because of the plethora of undocumented MS-DOS features Windows used, but if you would implement this, I'd ditch MS-DOS for good. I don't have any dedicated hardware yet, but I plan to get it some time in the future.
I haven't tried running Windows on top of FreeDOS, but I understand that others have done it. Remember the origins of FreeDOS .. I wouldn't be interested in Windows 3.x anyway. ;-)
I learned DOS early and still love it! A lot of great software was written to run on DOS and it still a useful operating system. I have my own older PC that only runs DOS and it applications. DBase was the database king in the DOS days, as WordPerfect and Lotus 123.
Re: "Microsoft wasn't trying to write UNIX" - Xenix, a pretty decent UNIX-like system in AT&T SysV family for Intel processors was launched in 1980, the same year as PC-DOS 1.0.
From my perspective, DOS was an exercise in forgetting everything that anybody else had learned and making their own mistakes all over again. I had been working with PDP-11s (RT-11 and RSX-11) and a VAX 780. I was used to multiple people sharing a machine, and running real-time multi-processing. Then DOS came along and forgot all that. Then it added kludge on kludge (extended memory paging/swapping) and weak forms of multi-processing. As an engineer used to reliable, predictable multi-processing, this came as a rude shock when I was forced to write software for Windows 3.1 to drive analytical instruments. It's not because DOS works with less resources - our PDP-11s had around 256KB of memory. OK, we're way past that now, and modern OSs (Linux and Windows) far exceed the capabilities of those early engineering OSs. But we could have been here quicker...
DOS was written for a personal computer that didn’t have the capability to support lots of people using it at the same time. It was about as sophisticated as an 8088 could support.
Yeah I learned to code with Quick Basic, I remember making a windows like program for my neighbor so he had his computer starting up automatically to that menu program where he could use his mouse to open the other programs that he wanted to use, that was my first real thing I made for someone else that actually got some use of it.
Another overlooked reason why FreeDOS will remain alive is because of the vendors. Back in 2013 we bought a low-end laptop, and it was shipped with FreeDOS, as Windows licemce wasn't included. Additionally, many BIOS flashing utilities require DOS, and are, therefore, shipped with FreeDOS
Kildall did acknowledge the influence of various Digital operating systems, but mostly TOPS-10. All of the DEC systems of the time were influenced by each other though, including RT-11 and the versions of RSX-11. It's incredible to think of all the split energy inside that company trying to support so many systems. Luckily they had a hit with the superb VMS (which was heavy influence on Windows NT of course). Operating systems are a small world of people 'borrowing' other ideas.
21:12 Oh yeah the reason they made it monochrome is because it was a design choice. The tradeoff was, have a monochrome desktop and have 512x342 resolution. THat makes it much more useable for desktop publishing and productivity software. Whereas the Amiga 1000/500 and Atari ST had color, but only 320x200 which is why GEM and Workbench looked like toys. That was the choice given only a certain amount of VRAM in the machine's budget.
Remember the program X-Tree Gold? That was my go to program for managing files and directories, it's a program like Total Commander which was very useful.
small correction on the memory tools. By MS-DOS 5.0, the 1MB memory barrier was becoming an issue, but the trend of expansion cards needing dedicated memory in the first 386KB was also a growing issue. This is what EMM386 and LH were great at, besides scrubbing 'high' memory for use with the rest of you app memory pool :D
James, congratulations to you and the others for the success of FreeDOS! I'm very encouraged to see this great news. I don't know if you remember: I used to contribute to the documentation project. I created step 0 for the instructions to help people prepare for following the regular steps.
I *do* remember you! More than just "contribute," I recall you helped run the FreeDOS Documentation Project for a while. That was a great way to share the docs before we had a wiki. (For others reading this, the Documentation Project was long before "wiki" was a thing.)
looks like the power on detection circuit is a bit iffy. In general from this era, they worked by pull the cpu's reset pin down (RESET) at power-on, for a few milliseconds. then, after the psu had stabilised, releasing it. My UK101(Ohio superboard 1978) has a reset Switch on the keyboard. You could do this, put a little spring loaded reset toggle switch on your unit. Or, look at what's connected to your cpu's RESET pin. There's only two possibilities for failure of power-on reset circuit. 1) it fails to pull RESET down (or up depending on which cpu) at power-on. 2)it isn't holding it down long enough for your psu to stabilise. This looks alot like case 1. If you follow the circuit from your cpu reset pin, a pc from this era, might have just a pull-up resistor to 5v, and a pull-down capacitor to GND. Check out the Capacitor first. You can buy, or I can send you, power-up reset detectors nowadays though. they're really cheap, and only about the size of a BC547 transistor. They were designed to get around the problems of dodgey power-up detection using R-C circuits. Also, if your psu has a lot of ripple, this can cause R-C detectors to act weird. Though, in the short clip you give at end, yours doesn't look to be acting up in the right way for that. That momentous fist sized electrolytic, should be 1st port of call if your scope shows psu is excessively ripely. As ever, AWESOME VIDEO, respect! please keep em coming, and show us this old veteran in action soon.
Definitely good to check on the electrolytics. If they're not sealed well then the electrolyte can leach out over time, which causes them to lose capacitance. I think there was a problem with Chinese capacitors manufactured during a certain time period that had this issue. The overall impact is that it will either pull down for a shorter period, or won't pull down at all, either way not giving the PSU enough time to stabilize.
Well, modern computers (and most other systems using digital processors) works exactly the same way. RESET is held down (say 500ms) during power stabilisation.
@@herrbonk3635 Yes, Absolutely! Was just pointing out the original RC method could be a bit iffy at the best of times. Especially if you add in old electrolytics. Personally I use reset and brown-out detectors nowadays, they're so much cheaper than in the 80s. But your right of course, they also just pull the RESET pin down till PSU has stabilised. Just more reliably than the old RC ever could.
Your mention of the UK101 brought back some memories of building mine somewhere around 1980, and the hours of keying in BASIC programs from computer magazines, and waiting for a cassette recorder to reach the correct place on the tape, before actually loading the code. Around that time, I was in charge of a 24 user unix system running purchased COBOL business programs for which I had negotiated getting the source code so that I could add features for job costing work done in a bespoke spring and pressing manufacturing company. I missed all the unix commands on my home computer, but some time later I heard of unix simulator - MKS Toolkit - software that would run unix commands under DOS, but could not afford its cost. I contacted the company selling the simulator - based near my home - to try to get a 'student' version, but ended up using my previous technical author experience to write an appraisal of the software for them, which was published in the April 1988 issue of a magazine called .EXE. Not only did I get a free copy of the software, but I also earned the unexpected sum of £317 for the 3,170 word article!
I once used FreeDOS in the company to run a very old program that needed DOS to run that would not run on XP on the laptop (not networked) that I still use. I started PC at the brink of MS-DOS 5.01, still got in touch wit 3.30. Nowadays I run Linux on most of my computers. All due respect (and even because I started out with it) I often refer to DOS as "Daddy's Old System"... in a loving way, for sure. 🤗 I like to make fun of it
I recall, back in the day, using DOS on a machine with just a single floppy drive (no hard disk.) You'd insert a DOS disk, boot up to load DOS in memory, then remove the DOS disk and insert the disk with whatever program you wanted to run, like a word processor. IF/When the system crashed, you had to put the DOS disk back in and restart. I was working as a PC tech in a government office building, and I recall a crowd gathering to watch me install a 5MB hard disk. (Not GB. MB.) They found the amount of space that would have amazing, and most couldn't imagine what all that could be used for.
Lotus 123 and Word Perfect dominated office machines for a long while. I recall having Windows 1, and all it was good for was running the clock. I'd load 10 clocks on the screen and watch it. CPU was so over taxed that the hands of each clock had to move separately, and none could keep p with actual time, so the seconds hands would jump several seconds at a time. Windows 3.1 was the first actually useful version, but it was clearly running on top of DOS, as you'd often have to drop windows, get something done in DOS, then bring Windows up again. Thanks for this trip down memory lane!
P-Code, under a Pascal runtime pseudo object intermediate bridge, did allow for many programs and San Diego State University was a big cheerleader for the code. It's interesting, as P-Code was a precursor to Bytecode.
Yes, the ability to just write a P-Code interpreter and implement some hardware-specific functions and get a full system with compiler and development environment allowed Pascal to spread over many mincomputers of the 70's and eventually the Apple II microcomputer. It was available on the IBM PC, but by that time Turbo Pascal displaced it.
Thank you for sharing that. I remember that first Tomb Raider I think. Our computer had Windows 3.11 at the time, but it came with some dos programs as well.
19:20 > Wasn't WordStar before? I just remember the secretary of a school in the middle 90s using it, when it was already Microsoft Word. She was really amazed from it and also used to the lot of key combinations she had to memorized
Agreed. Funny how the Great Innovator m$ always seemed to introduce new features into MSDOS - after DRDOS released them first. DRDOS 6 introduced all sorts of good stuff - that somehow then appeared in MSDOS 6.22. m$ was even sued for copying code and lost that case. Anyway... Quit using MSDOS once I got a copy of DRDOS 6. Best thing ever to run on an XT class machine if you had an expanded memory board. It could backfill and poke all sorts of things into upper memory and you could task switch applications.
It took me years to get over having to give up Qedit along with DOS (I think I was running DR DOS back then) when I was forced to switch to Windows by outside forces... I used both constantly back in the day. Throw in Desqview, and a couple modems and we had ourselves a 2-line BBS... Ah the good old days. It's weird that I can still remember my Fidonet address but ask me what I had for lunch yesterday and it's a crapshoot whether or not I could tell you.
I remember using a Spreadsheet called Twin, but it was a little unstable. Also liked Sidekick which was a memory resident utility and app launcher… Those were the days… Per (DK)
I loved As Easy As spreadsheet when I was at university (physics major). I used that for all my lab analysis - worked great! It was very full featured. If I didn't need to share spreadsheets, I think As Easy As could meet 95% or more of my spreadsheet needs today.
I actually have a spreadsheet called SC, Spreadsheet Calculator, installed my Linux PC that runs in bash. I believe it was ported from DOS. I intended to use it more when I installed it.
Dos was great to boot into to relieve overhead from windows for gaming but was also powerful for everything diagnostic. Fdisk, format, defrag, bootsector, scandisk, etc. I'm rusty so I forgot the actual cmds for all of them. You could literally do everything needed without a gui but the cmds could resemble shorthand by the time you had your flags & cmds typed out. I don't miss it.
WordPerfect was a very powerful (for the time) word processor. Hard to use if you didn't have the keyboard template (and even sometimes if you *did* have the template) but it could do a lot.
Awesome documentary... thank you so much. I wanted to ask you please, can you tell us what kind of programs you made on MS-DOS? I'm a programmer myself, and I used DOS as a kid, and wrote stuff on BASIC and I really loved learning about all of the commands. I was always helping people install hard disks, or cd-roms, and then on Windows 3.1 I used Borland Delphi a lot, but I never got to learn actual real programing such as using assembly or C at that time. I did use BASIC a lot but that was on an MSX computer. So I'm very very curious about what kind of programs you wrote and how. I'm fulfilling my life long dream now and learning MS-DOS, C and Assembly, and I'm working on a VirtualBox machine for now on my MacBook. I bought a bunch of technical books on MS-DOS programming, and my goal is to learn how to program a driver. I'm not sure what I'm getting myself into LOL but it certainly feels so good. Please tell me more about what you did as far as programming, it would be super motivating. Thank you so much for this.
The programs I wrote for myself on MS-DOS were pretty simple but helped me to get stuff done. For example, I didn't like certain DOS commands, so I made my own versions in C with new features, like a version of TYPE that converted text to upper/lower, converted tabs to spaces, etc. Or a version of DIR that colorized the output so it was easier to see what was there. Things like that. I also made small utility progams that did specific, useful things. As an undergrad physics student, I wrote a lot of programs in FORTRAN77 .. and I might write that in a local editor, and then dial into the university VAX to compile it and run it. So I had a program that did certain checks for FORTRAN77 (like a primitive linter, but targeted specifically for me). That way, I spent less time dialed into the modem pool for coding and debugging, so I could use that time to just run my stuff and hang up. When I started using LaTeX to write documents, I wrote a QBASIC program that prepped a plain text file for use in LaTeX. And when I started exploring nroff (see my other video) I wrote a program that converted my LaTeX files to nroff (if they didn't have equations). And I wrote one-off programs to do data analysis for my physics labs (a lot of those) and do numerical analysis and numerical simulation. These were not very sophisticated, just stuff that helped me do my thing.
@@freedosproject This is fantastic... I bet everything looks simpler to you when you have dedicated lots of time to understanding the subject. I will surely be watching all your other videos, I browsed through the channel and I saw many programming related ones (and ehem... gaming...) that I'd like to watch. I know that the best way to achieve something is listening to those who achieved it so there you go, and your answering personally is extremely motivating to me so I appreciate that. You'll keep seeing me around for a while hopefully, this is a lonnnnnng subject.
Boy, does this bring back the memories. I remained true to DOS until 1996 or 1997. Win 95 who? Anyone remember the software suite Enable? The tetris-like game Lockout?
I just recently started to experiment with FreeDos, and I am hooked now. All I want to do all day is tinker around with it. I am, however, as a beginner, experiencing a lot of issues, like how to transfer programs, drivers, etc., from my other computer, as I am still not familiar with how to adjust the USB port to be recognized by the system, and so on... But in general, I wish I could have FreeDos as my daily SW in the future...
Welcome to FreeDOS! If you're running FreeDOS in a virtual machine, you should be able to "mount" the virtual disk from your "host" operating system (like Linux or Windows). I run Linux, and I use the guestmount command. I described it here: opensource.com/article/21/6/copy-files-linux-freedos But if your file manager "recognizes" the virtual disk image, you should be able to open it directly and copy your files. Just be sure the virtual machine isn't running, or it will mess up the data.
I got to experience some DOS games as a 90s kid. I still think there was something special about those early games, probably the creativity and passion put into them. But I also find it strange that many schools and businesses are still using price scanner UI and student gradebook UI that look like they came from the 1980s.
Good video. When I was very young (4 or less), we had a monochrome IBM clone with some version of DOS, I think: no GUI whatsoever, Math Blasters, and WordPerfect. I remember getting it out in the 2000s and messing around with it. It was frustrating seeing that C:\>_ just stare at you and having no idea what to do... Now I run so many programs via a TTY in a Linux distro. I don't think I could go without multitasking.
That is a pretty advanced CP/M. Originally they had no concept of time. Many computers simply had no system that could tell the time or date. There was MS-DOS before. For example MS-DOS 2.11 was popular. In the early days there were several MS-DOS machines that were neither BIOS nor hardware compatible with IBM PC so they could not directly run IBM binaries that for example accessed the screen directly but one could with relative ease port software to them.
Gary Kildall was the first to write an operating system for disk storage, Shugart, to be exact...for personal (single user) use. So arguably his control program for micros is the premier disk operating system. It was just as much written for an eight bit microprocessor from Intel. It was the first time eight bits controlled a disk that was designed for the mainframes of the day, disks being the cutting edge tech. Seattle QDOS was mainly an adaptation of Gary's DOS specifically for Intel's next generation 16 bit chip, which Gary was a little slow in developing. Seattle mainly wanted to sell hardware for the 16 bit chip. It could just as easily have been called COS, for Chip Operating System, or, operating system for the highest tech at the time. But that was Unix. What we are really interested in is what is the most advanced OS for the most advanced hardware...FOR THE MOST MICRO COMPUTERS at that snapshot in time. The most micro could be interpreted as the most personal at the most affordable for home use. What OS gives someone the most power from home with what was available at the time. As a hobby, it's a lot like classic cars. What, for example, is the most power you can still get given a Ford Model T. It's about hot-rodding a specific combo of hardware made available to home users. Hardware was always advancing faster than operating systems could be fully hotrodded. That is, if you were forced to live in a snapshot in time with hardware, but your software was still flexible, there is usually a lot more you would do, and could do, to make your system easier to use, more effective, more powerful, and, more profitable. Those systems could, after all, trade stock market (any market) algorithms very profitably....but few ever were. So, if it was 1983, and all you could afford was a monochrome monitor, two 5 1/4" floppy, 64k RAM and an 8 bit Z80 chip and a modem, what OS would you use to automatically log on to the bulletin boards once a day, get stock data, run some algorithms, and print out buy/sell recommendations that you would call in to a broker (better yet if also automated) to net average 100% per year with a max 25% drawdown and no losing months? This is STILL a thing. What OS, and what off the shelf apps, and what custom programs would you, or could you use to develop and implement such a return on investment? In 1983, you could have found such a computer (sans modem) running the latest OS from Digital Research CP/M 3.1, with an included bundle of software include Microsoft's Multiplan spreadsheet, and DR's CBasic and Graph... for $400 new, in a fire-sale.
I used PCWrite on DOS, did the job well enough and was shareware. Even bought copies of it for work, licensed. Also used Enable 4.5 and before. Fantastic office app with SS, editior, DB, & more. I think the DB is better than MSO or LibreOffice (which I use). Enable's DB could do amazing things, and on limited hardware. I still have the files to run PCWrite and Enable, but do not have the desire to go back to that hardware.
Great video and brings back a lot of memories. But, Quattro, while decent, never took any significant market share, at least in the US. Lotus stomped Visicalc (Visicorp had a lot of issues as a company) and owned the market until Windows 3. Excel was way ahead at the point since Lotus delayed a windows version for so long until it was too late. I used Lotus 1-2-3 (and AmiPro) until 2000 or so. It was a Windows version at that point was really dated compared to Excel.
There's a lot of people who have worked over the last 28+ years to make FreeDOS what it is - I'm especially thankful for our kernel maintainers and command,com (aka "FreeCOM") maintainers and everyone who's worked on the distributions. They are the heart of FreeDOS. :)
My problem with FreeDos is that there is not enought support for having it in segments fitting on floppies for installation in legacy machines. if it was not such a pain to install on vintage machines, i'd gladly instally in on my 8088 which is my main computer for serious, focussed writing.
The FreeDOS 1.3 distribution includes a floppy-only mini-distribution. You can try it out right now in the FreeDOS 1.3 release candidate: www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.3/previews/1.3-rc3/ Look for the "x86" version, which contains floppy images you can use to install FreeDOS on a legacy machine.
I would suggest connecting the drive from your PC to a more modern PC using some kind of adapter, and then install FreeDOS directly onto the hard drive.
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Thank you for your work on FreeDOS! It is truly a valuable contribution to the IT world and will be appreciated many years to come.
Thank you too!
Can you give me examples of how you are using FreeDos? I'm interested in knowing what things you can do with it but I'm at a loss except for a retro dos machine ior replacing DOS systems.
@@jackkraken3888There's the embedded space; compliance - such as replacing a version of MS-DOS of questionable provenance with FreeDOS; bootable media; Dell and hp releasing their PCs with FreeDOS instead of Windows (for those who want to install Linux or BSD); bootable media for updating a computer's BIOS and motherboard firmware; disk and system recovery; running unique and very necessary old DOS software, especially in industrial spaces and specific trades.
sorry freeDOS doesn't get the recognition it deserves, great project!
Indeed indeed!
Indeed 👍
Doesn't it?
Neither did CP/M.
DOS should be free: it’s a crime that Bill Gates was able to take something that already existed and charge for it. Imagine how much better computing would be if Microsoft had never been!
DOS is a nifty operating system. I credit the fact that I know as much about computing as I do to the fact that I had old computers to play with and experiment with in my formative years. DOS is simple enough that you can basically learn the whole thing in a week or so, but versatile enough to still be useful. Giving a curious young mind the power to know how a complex system works inside and out is a recipe for self education. Unfortunately, today's most common modern computing devices aren't so transparent. With so much of the inner working buried in countless layers of abstraction, they may as well work with magic. You can't play around and see how it works. It's depriving a generation of something great.
Yes, I love that DOS has so few moving parts, so folks can see what's happening. Like you, I learned about how computers work by working on DOS.
Minimalist Linux and BSD are pretty transparent, lots of young people run arch, for example, although they definitely have more components than DOS.
Me too, i think i know more than the lay about computers because this i what i had when i was kid to play Doom.
It also makes you grow up with a different perspective of what is an OS.
Yes, I fully agree. I also played around with DOS a little bit when I was a teenager (even though at that time I already had WinXP on my PC), and it's probably one of the things that kinda got me a little bit more into programming.
@@HippieInHeart Same here! I love how modular DOS is. I just played about with DOS boot disks -- really a minimal OS consisting of ~5 files. Some DOS boot disks made their own RAMdisk and I remember being able to strip down Windows 3.1 enough to run from a RAMdisk and fit on a single floppy!
Wow. What a heroic effort. Love to see you still passionate about this project. People like you help keep free software alive. Big cheers.
Thanks!
Love the historical perspective. I cut my teeth on a Commodore PET and C64, then DOS 3.x, and later Amiga OS 1.3 on an A500. People getting into computing now don't realize how much easier things are today.
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. I think it's important to show some of the computing history, too.
Probably the by far best feature added by DOS 6 was the boot menus.. especially as a gamer, you finally could add multiple choices to optimize the sh*t out of your limited base memory, depending on whether a game needs a CD or not, or comes with a DOS extender that doesn't play well with EMM386, etc..
Definitely a great tool! That's why we included the boot menu feature in FreeDOS too.
Pretty much how i ran my gaming rigs on xp. I could boot normally into windows or just run the game from boot without the majority of windows even activating. I think i had 3-4 active tasks at the most including the game exe.
Now i look at the windows services with utter horror. All 300 active unnecessary 🤦
yep. I remember setting my first one up when I was 12 using a 1000 page DOS manual. all my friends were using boot disks for games or had amigas and I had a goddamn multiboot running. All so I could run Red Baron without swapping disks lol
My favorite thing about DOS is its ability to run in extremely limited environments. And although newer systems added more and more resources (faster CPUs, much more RAM, storage etc), modern OSes have placed so many additional demands on the system that it doesn't _feel_ as fast as DOS was back in the day.
That's definitely a great thing about DOS - the low overhead means it can run really fast.
Heh, run it off a modern system and the programs will be finished before you've even started then! 😀
@@zyeborm Yep, I remember finding "The Incredible Machine" (great puzzle game) for DOS for a few bucks and tried to play it on my very modest system (at the time) and it was so fast you couldn't tell what was happening. Luckily I found a small program that slowed down the processor enough so I could play it. Years later I discovered "DosBox" and that made life much easier.
"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away"!
@@akallio9000 ROFL😂
I have a soft spot for DOS. Started with DOS 3.2 and remembered 4.0 which could partition a 40MB IDE hard drive in one partition. Exciting times.
One of the things that annoys me with modern computing is that they keep throwing out old paradigms and expect everyone to learn a new bag of tricks, which often are not any better. So good on you for keeping the DOS flame alive. All the best.
real ogs fk with dos
friend got a greyish box with a weird monochrome tv on top for christmas '89.
we spent the whole night studying manuals, typing cryptic commands, trying to copy our first file onto a 5,25'' floppy. those creaking sounds... precious. DOS will always have a special place in my heart, the first love.
thank you for your work!!
Glad you liked the video!
WordStar on MS-DOS (on my dad's Compaq) was the program that made me fall back in love with writing as a teenager. I've used many other word processors since then, but there was just something about it that made me want to write.
The funky way its default view had a command menu covering half the screen seems absurd in hindsight, but it had the effect of making the program seem trivial to use. Everything you needed to know was right there (unless you hid the menu, which you could).
When you got into the word processors, it brought back long buried memories of doing newspaper copies with wordperfect.
Don't forget that CP/M had a GUI too, called GEM, graphical environment manager. It shipped at standard with some systems, notably the Amstrad PC1512/1640 in the UK in the mid to late 19800s. I've done a fair bit of programming in the companion product, PL/M, programming language for microprocessors, which was Intel''s standard supported language on its development systems alongside ASM/xx an assembler.
Curious, I thought GEM was first developed for DR-DOS. After a bit of searching, I see DR DOS was a CP/M-86 implementation and MS-DOS compatible, interesting! Still, I don't like GEM very much. In Atari ST form it was my first GUI operating system, and I refreshed my memory of it in recent years with OpenGEM under FreeDOS. In neither case did I find it comfortable to use. The version in Atari's TOS 1.4 ROMs (or was it 1.04,) was improved; you could scroll without losing your selection, but OpenGEM lacks that improvement. OpenGEM does have the improvement of menus only opening on click if you wish. (I think TOS 1.4 had that too, but it was too long ago.) On the ST, the combination of a terrible mouse with my neurological problems meant menus were always jumping into my view! lol But both my health and mouse technology has improved tremendously over the years.
@@eekee6034 Well GEM didn't really have any serious applications for it which made it fairly useless and it wasn't being particularly promoted. I did fire it up out of curiosity and remember looking at some appointments or calendar app but that was about it. It may have also included GEM Paint, not sure. There's a video "The Amstrad PC 1512 Computer with Tom Scott" here on TH-cam. At 15:37 you can see the GEM desktop. This was back in 1986, only a couple of years after the Mac launched, but Apple made sure to make more of a thing about the OS. It was a bit slow too but that could be improved a bit by fitting an NEC V30 CPU instead of the 8086 (it had the genuine 16 bit CPU).
Ooh yeah I remember GEM as an option on the Amstrad!
@@grahamstevenson1740 I think it's unfair to say that Gem didn't have any serious applications.
I used GEM Writer (or was it called Write?) a lot and it was in my opinion much better than the other WYSIWYG word processors at the time
I still miss the fact that you could set it to beep on a spelling mistake, rather than having to go back and look for highlighting or wiggly underlines and the other visual indicator everyone else used.
I half agree with you over Paint. GEM Paint was not that different from the contemporary MS Paint.
CP/M the DOS alternative. IBM offered this is an alternative to DOS on their first PC if I remember correctly.
Awesome video. And I like the direction of FreeDOS 1.3. Cheers!
Glad you liked it!
I honestly want to thank for all the work You did put into the project!
Everyone has put a bunch of time and effort into it!
Without your OS, I would not be able to breathe new live in this old PC i have lying around keeping it from going into the land fill. thank you so much.
We're glad you enjoy it!
Awesome. Brought DOS memories flooding back.
Thanks! I'm glad you liked the video. :-)
Man, it's hard to believe that all this DOS stuff is really ancient history, and little known by most people. My first PC compatible computer was a Packard-Bell 486 in 1994. So I actually missed most of the earlier DOS development, as my computer had MS-DOS 6.0 (which I quickly upgraded to 6.22 and ran Windows For Workgroups 3.11 on top of it. I loved WFW, but I certainly explored everything I could find on the computer, including all the DOS commands and programs.
Later on, I played wtih OpenDOS/DR-DOS which had some nifty features to it as well.
I remember DOS... but man I have forgot more about DOS than most people around today even knows about it... Used oodles of hours tinkering with it, optimizing it, trying new stuff... and of course way too much time playing games :D
I'm still using DOS on my older PCs when I'm in the mood for some WatcomC or playing Doom & Warcraft.
Thanks for keeping the "spirit" alive!
Try doom on a raspberry pi. They have compiled custom versions of doom that look amazing.
LOL! I'm a grey-beard (born in 1961 and started programming in 1976) and found this a pretty accurate review of the history of early DOS versions. I have to point out however that many of the DOS 2.x commands were unbelievably braindead. The "more" command being a prime example. In the early 80's I was exposed to Unix and found its "more" command so superior to the DOS version I wrote my own DOS version in assembly so that searching and paging backwards (as well as forwards) worked.
Thanks!
My life is flashing before my eyes!
4:20 keep in mind the "Operating system" was a completely separate to whatever allowed you to control/manage a disk drives. Depending on how you booted the computer, it may not be able to access a disk drive, if the drive was powered on AFTER the computer booted, it would be unaware of that peripheral, and you had to reboot again to load data from a drive.
Atari 8bit computers were like that, which allowed it to have more RAM free if there was no disk operating system loaded, but it also allowed it use various kinds of DOSes to fit your needs. You could run simple boot-loader menus, that booted FAST and only used a TINY amount of space on the disk to boot, display it's contents and wait for the user to pick something from a menu. Then you had more traditional Atari DOS menu driven allowing you to manage files, but you had to exit out of BASIC to use DOS, and vice versa to just get a directory listing. Then there were command line DOS like SpartaDOS which was very similar to MS-DOS that allowed batch files to run.
Yet other computers like Commodores didn't care what powered on first and let you "boot" a floppy disk with a simple command in BASIC, meaning it's "DOS" was always loaded in RAM, even you didn't own a floppy drive. Yet to get a directory listing meant you had to clear whatever BASIC code you had in memory since the directory listing was loaded into memory as a BASIC program, as REM statements. So you were stuck with just one way of interacting with floppy drives, at least until Fast Load carts came into being.
These days the OS and disk management is all under one roof now.
Amazing video! Raymond Chen has a blog called "What’s the difference between the COM and EXE extensions?" describing how EXE was separated from COM using undefined operations as a header and not the file extension for backwards compatibility reasons. It's a good read and I can see why you're hesitant in adding new capabilities.
I will check it out that blog. Sounds interesting.
Amazing presentation on the history and background of DOS - as to the 80s and home personal computers I devoured the old Osborne programming books as a teen that made a real effort to make the printed BASIC code be adapted to individual home PC systems. A great time of keying in programs and trying to find your data entry mistakes in so many lines of BASIC programs. lol. Thank you Jim for the ongoing reality of FreeDOS (and kudos to so many people who committed software to this OS). May the history of FreeDOS be long from here.
I have head of FreeDOS, though I have never used it. I am much more likely to now, after seeing this great video. And I have plenty of old hardware (8088, 286, 386, 486 & Pentium) to try it on! Thank you for your efforts keeping this project alive over the decades.
Glad it was helpful!
Currently building a retro PC and installed FreeDOS 1.3 on a CF card and it was AMAZING how everything worked instantly, different memory/cpu mode options, mouse, cdrom, even my AWE64 sound card with ~620k free conventional memory. No need for messy config, just install and enjoy my good old games. Awesome work!
Great! I'm glad you like FreeDOS! We think it's pretty awesome. :-)
Freedos is the reason for my current playing of roguelikes, the IVAN package included in the games lead me into a rabbit hole that ended in Cataclysm DDA, and the wonders of a soothing shot of heroin.
It's great to hear the history that I went thru. I remember the first version of windows was a pain in the neck, trying to get your DOS programs to run in a window. My 1st computer was almost a K-Pro but I went with Leading Personal Computer in 1984, a IBM clone. I had that machine from about 10 years. While I had others as well. A little Correction - The LE came with MSDOS 2.11 with a 10 Mb drive and 5" floppies, which I still have the books for it. Nice history.
"In computing, compatibility beats innovation, every time." (Gene Amdahl?) To this day, there is some compatibility (in a sense) going all the way back to 1981 and that is quite fascinating as well.
Definitely! ☺
Some companies (and projects, hello GNOME) could learn from that.
@@SenileOtaku GNOME won't change, they were the world leaders in finding ways to force people to upgrade. I lived through that era using Linux full-time. It wasn't fun. :(
4:37 My exactly system I had in 1982, although I had the 8088 coprocessor together with the CPU a 8086 and 384k memory, and that HD had 20Mb drive space. Me was told, from a CEO from IBM, PC-DOS was meant to run, the big concurrent of MS WIN, (I forgot the name), OS/1 (which look the same as WIN, or something? And when you put it on, if everything was ok, you see this....
C:\> _ lol, brings back memories. I forgot a lot commando's, I worked with dbase III and later IV on that machine. I followed MS-DOS till v5.0 I think, and went to Windows from that on. But still worked from the command line, darn, in that 1.0 there wasn't even a xcopy command, well it had its romantics, but now it's even more challenging, keeping the bad boys out of your system. And all the crap on the chats.
18:37 fun fact, excel to this day has a Lotus123 compatibility mode
I started on Compaq DOS 3.31 and evolved up to MS-DOS 6.22. FreeDOS is a great tool still, and this presentation was a nice trip down memory lane as well. Kudos to everyone involved!
30:24 Count me among those who are running FreeDOS on a 486. I have FreeDOS installed on an IBM ThinkPad 701C.
Sigh, command line driven operating systems. DOS, UNIX, running AS400s, those were days when I was a young man with many years ahead of misery ahead of me, but the potential.
I miss the way the old systems worked, the BIOS code beeps, using DOS. I don't think I've heard of FreeDOS before but now I need to check it out. Thanks for the good memories that using this will bring back.
Gaming class motherboards still have BIOS code beeps even in this day and age.
If I remember right DOS 4x is when they added much of the myriad of batch commands - which are now considered "magic" commands - How did you do that in a batch program? (I wave my hands) - magic!!!
These are commands you now have to look up on stack overflow these days. Things like picking out text in file.... you can do that in a batch?????? Yes, yes you can.
I was once told at work that our database program array was too difficult to automate. Our programmers tried and tried but they could not get away from the manual intensive methods of installing a program and then setting it up manually, over about 5 programs that dealt with the database. So I wrote a batch file that did it because I was doing testing on an array of customer database mockups and I identified this manual BS as the biggest time waster. I took a 3 hour process and made it a bit less than 10 minutes. Our programming team could not figure out this batch file, and I had made it with functions and well thought out routines. This was NO spaghetti code!! It was properly structured with error traps and all the bells and whistles a regular program has... about 1900 lines of batch code. Eventually I had to write a white paper on it, as to how it worked because it used such obscure batch commands, no one could figure it out!!! Actually, there was some code in there that I lifted from stack exchange, and I wasn't even sure how it worked, but I knew what it did. Needless to say,, our programmers were none too happy that an engineer did what they said was impossible.
Thanks stack exchange!!! couldn't have done it without you!!!!
Definitely the way to do it. We had two scripts, one to create the database and one to update to current. When you wanted to modify the database, you'd never modify it directly but would add the code to the update script and run it. At various intervals, you'd make a new create script and empty out the update script (or just keep it).
A nice DOS historical review. Now I know why the join command is there :) My favorite version was MS-DOS 3.30. Thanks for the FreeDOS.
Glad you enjoyed it!
There was also DRDOS. I used drdos 6 with some UPDATE if I recall. Superstor maximized disc space with compression. I might still have original diskettes. At work there is still operating one AGFA 135 daylight film splicer with DOS 2.11
You forgot Database applications!
First big company i went to work at was during the end of the "diskette" age before hard disks took over, the "trinity" we ran was Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheeting, dNase III for database operations, and Multimate (also distributed by Ashton-Tate) for word processing.
You mean dBase ?
Thank you for the tour. Aften this I HAVE to check out FreeDOS, maybe on my old IBM PS/2 286 with an original IBM keyboard, mouse and color monitor 🙂
You should!
I wrote a menu system for 3.0 that I wish now I had tried to market. I needed to run Ventura Publisher that needed all the bade memory I could give it and my menu system would run other DOS programs and would unload automatically when I needed it to load Ventura. I was pretty proud of that accomplishment.
Ventura was awsome for the day.
Very informative, and nostalgic for me. Thank you.I'm using DOS more lately, will try yours again, now that I know more about it.
Great to hear!
Thanks for the history of DOS and FreeDOS. I remember running WordStar under CP/M on an Apple ][ computer with the Microsoft Z-80 card. Later I ran it on an IBM PC. You can see how DOS has some of its roots in CP/M when you look at the way the memory at the start of RAM is laid out in both environments. You will find a number of similarities.
I wasnt even aware that DOS was still in use, thank you for this enlightenment
It's still around for some things.
Its in active use in retro gaming handhelds, that come preloaded with the dos games.
The Hand 386 is around 200 usd, hard to find, but its out there, a handheld dos computer that is made with modern parts
NOTE: DOS 4 Already had an EMM386.SYS , not EMM386.EXE but .sys,yes and EMMXMA.SYS and HIMEM.SYS memory management of some sort appears on DOS 4. The HELP in commands appears in DOS 5 (to compete with DR-DOS 5) which was better at this point than MS-DOS(PC-DOS).
As far as I know, everyone ignores DOS 4 because it was a compatibility disaster. IBM wanted things to be different for OS/2, or something.
@@eekee6034 The disaster was the unability to put drivers on to UMB or on to XMS or EMS as concerning to the DOS 4 which DR-DOS 5 has taken in account.
Do you remember QEMM ?
I bought a netbook especially for freedos. I always want a dos computer, not virtual machine. And now i have one. And yes, freedos is interesting and deserves some attention
Glad you like using FreeDOS - we think it's pretty cool! I bought a Pocket386 not long ago (see my other video on that) and it's great to run FreeDOS on real hardware. :-)
"..a message board called Usenet." Lol! Love the grossly succinct description.
Glad you liked that! I didn't want to go down the rabbit hole of explaining how Usenet worked, so "message board" seemed close enough. 🙂
@@freedosproject Usenet was the reddit of its day. Too bad its mostly a pirate depository now.
I don't think it would matter to me what you talked about, you just delivered it so well, I would listen to you rant about cleaning the house for half an hour
TH-cam just pushed this video to me in my list, nice stuff ! Desqview was my jam. Open to use DOS in 2023
I'm glad you found the video!
If it wasn't for gaming with my cousins occasionally, I'd probably make freeDOS my main OS at home because it does what I need with fewer distractions.
I really love that DOS is still kept alive with such an enthusiasm. However, what I still miss is full support for Windows 3.1 in 386 enhanced mode. I know it's quite a feat because of the plethora of undocumented MS-DOS features Windows used, but if you would implement this, I'd ditch MS-DOS for good. I don't have any dedicated hardware yet, but I plan to get it some time in the future.
I haven't tried running Windows on top of FreeDOS, but I understand that others have done it. Remember the origins of FreeDOS .. I wouldn't be interested in Windows 3.x anyway. ;-)
@@freedosproject Windows 3.x works just like normal on FreeDOS. I never had any issues installing it and getting it running.
My favourite thing about WordStar was the devs had a sense of humour - the command ^KY was “clear entry”
The picture of the TRS-80 brings back memories. I was a Radio Shack store manger in Maryland during that time.
Do you remember Jeff Black...?
I learned DOS early and still love it! A lot of great software was written to run on DOS and it still a useful operating system. I have my own older PC that only runs DOS and it applications. DBase was the database king in the DOS days, as WordPerfect and Lotus 123.
Re: "Microsoft wasn't trying to write UNIX" - Xenix, a pretty decent UNIX-like system in AT&T SysV family for Intel processors was launched in 1980, the same year as PC-DOS 1.0.
From my perspective, DOS was an exercise in forgetting everything that anybody else had learned and making their own mistakes all over again.
I had been working with PDP-11s (RT-11 and RSX-11) and a VAX 780. I was used to multiple people sharing a machine, and running real-time multi-processing.
Then DOS came along and forgot all that. Then it added kludge on kludge (extended memory paging/swapping) and weak forms of multi-processing. As an engineer used to reliable, predictable multi-processing, this came as a rude shock when I was forced to write software for Windows 3.1 to drive analytical instruments.
It's not because DOS works with less resources - our PDP-11s had around 256KB of memory.
OK, we're way past that now, and modern OSs (Linux and Windows) far exceed the capabilities of those early engineering OSs. But we could have been here quicker...
DOS was written for a personal computer that didn’t have the capability to support lots of people using it at the same time. It was about as sophisticated as an 8088 could support.
Don’t worry dude we are going back lol
Yeah I learned to code with Quick Basic, I remember making a windows like program for my neighbor so he had his computer starting up automatically to that menu program where he could use his mouse to open the other programs that he wanted to use, that was my first real thing I made for someone else that actually got some use of it.
Thank you for the great presentation. Really great to get a historical view on DOS origins and development.
I spent an _awful_ lot of time in the *PC-Write* text editor writing my code. I really loved it. I still have a mug.
Very cool!
I had the Star package on my Kaypro. Very nice. Thanks for the video.
I remember doing tape backups on a PDP11 in 1989 when I was employed as a Computer Operator. I worked in IT from 1987 to 2019, now happily retired.
Another overlooked reason why FreeDOS will remain alive is because of the vendors. Back in 2013 we bought a low-end laptop, and it was shipped with FreeDOS, as Windows licemce wasn't included. Additionally, many BIOS flashing utilities require DOS, and are, therefore, shipped with FreeDOS
This is not true. Recent hardware utilizes EFI binaries for flashing utilities.
RT-11 is the PDP OS, you're thinking of, I think. Very DOS and CP/M like.
Kildall did acknowledge the influence of various Digital operating systems, but mostly TOPS-10. All of the DEC systems of the time were influenced by each other though, including RT-11 and the versions of RSX-11. It's incredible to think of all the split energy inside that company trying to support so many systems. Luckily they had a hit with the superb VMS (which was heavy influence on Windows NT of course). Operating systems are a small world of people 'borrowing' other ideas.
21:12 Oh yeah the reason they made it monochrome is because it was a design choice. The tradeoff was, have a monochrome desktop and have 512x342 resolution. THat makes it much more useable for desktop publishing and productivity software. Whereas the Amiga 1000/500 and Atari ST had color, but only 320x200 which is why GEM and Workbench looked like toys. That was the choice given only a certain amount of VRAM in the machine's budget.
Remember the program X-Tree Gold? That was my go to program for managing files and directories, it's a program like Total Commander which was very useful.
X-tree was awesome. Did you ever try Z-tree?
Interesting review of DOS. I never did use the MS-DOS Shell. Probably because most of my time was spent coding in the Turbo C IDE at the time.
I was really surprised moving from CP/M to the PDP-11.... "Oh, the COPY command is just an alias to PIP and PIP is just the same as on CP/M!"
small correction on the memory tools. By MS-DOS 5.0, the 1MB memory barrier was becoming an issue, but the trend of expansion cards needing dedicated memory in the first 386KB was also a growing issue. This is what EMM386 and LH were great at, besides scrubbing 'high' memory for use with the rest of you app memory pool :D
James, congratulations to you and the others for the success of FreeDOS! I'm very encouraged to see this great news.
I don't know if you remember: I used to contribute to the documentation project. I created step 0 for the instructions to help people prepare for following the regular steps.
I *do* remember you! More than just "contribute," I recall you helped run the FreeDOS Documentation Project for a while. That was a great way to share the docs before we had a wiki. (For others reading this, the Documentation Project was long before "wiki" was a thing.)
looks like the power on detection circuit is a bit iffy. In general from this era, they worked by pull the cpu's reset pin down (RESET) at power-on, for a few milliseconds. then, after the psu had stabilised, releasing it. My UK101(Ohio superboard 1978) has a reset Switch on the keyboard. You could do this, put a little spring loaded reset toggle switch on your unit. Or, look at what's connected to your cpu's RESET pin. There's only two possibilities for failure of power-on reset circuit. 1) it fails to pull RESET down (or up depending on which cpu) at power-on. 2)it isn't holding it down long enough for your psu to stabilise. This looks alot like case 1. If you follow the circuit from your cpu reset pin, a pc from this era, might have just a pull-up resistor to 5v, and a pull-down capacitor to GND. Check out the Capacitor first. You can buy, or I can send you, power-up reset detectors nowadays though. they're really cheap, and only about the size of a BC547 transistor. They were designed to get around the problems of dodgey power-up detection using R-C circuits.
Also, if your psu has a lot of ripple, this can cause R-C detectors to act weird. Though, in the short clip you give at end, yours doesn't look to be acting up in the right way for that. That momentous fist sized electrolytic, should be 1st port of call if your scope shows psu is excessively ripely. As ever, AWESOME VIDEO, respect! please keep em coming, and show us this old veteran in action soon.
Definitely good to check on the electrolytics. If they're not sealed well then the electrolyte can leach out over time, which causes them to lose capacitance. I think there was a problem with Chinese capacitors manufactured during a certain time period that had this issue. The overall impact is that it will either pull down for a shorter period, or won't pull down at all, either way not giving the PSU enough time to stabilize.
Well, modern computers (and most other systems using digital processors) works exactly the same way. RESET is held down (say 500ms) during power stabilisation.
@@herrbonk3635 Yes, Absolutely! Was just pointing out the original RC method could be a bit iffy at the best of times. Especially if you add in old electrolytics. Personally I use reset and brown-out detectors nowadays, they're so much cheaper than in the 80s. But your right of course, they also just pull the RESET pin down till PSU has stabilised. Just more reliably than the old RC ever could.
Your mention of the UK101 brought back some memories of building mine somewhere around 1980, and the hours of keying in BASIC programs from computer magazines, and waiting for a cassette recorder to reach the correct place on the tape, before actually loading the code. Around that time, I was in charge of a 24 user unix system running purchased COBOL business programs for which I had negotiated getting the source code so that I could add features for job costing work done in a bespoke spring and pressing manufacturing company. I missed all the unix commands on my home computer, but some time later I heard of unix simulator - MKS Toolkit - software that would run unix commands under DOS, but could not afford its cost. I contacted the company selling the simulator - based near my home - to try to get a 'student' version, but ended up using my previous technical author experience to write an appraisal of the software for them, which was published in the April 1988 issue of a magazine called .EXE. Not only did I get a free copy of the software, but I also earned the unexpected sum of £317 for the 3,170 word article!
Nice presentation! Tip: You should have put the dates of release of each DOS, so that the user could follow the history better.
That would have been a better way to show it
It would be fun to add the Concurrency that Gary Kildall added.
I once used FreeDOS in the company to run a very old program that needed DOS to run that would not run on XP on the laptop (not networked) that I still use.
I started PC at the brink of MS-DOS 5.01, still got in touch wit 3.30. Nowadays I run Linux on most of my computers.
All due respect (and even because I started out with it) I often refer to DOS as "Daddy's Old System"... in a loving way, for sure. 🤗
I like to make fun of it
I don't know if you've done the talking bits of the video in 5:4 deliberately or by chance but it works really well for a DOS video!
Thanks! It was a feature in my webcam that I used at the time.
Dos and gwbasic was how I started in programming in the early 90s
BASIC programming was a great way to learn programming at the time. I was completely self taught on BASIC on the Apple II.
I recall, back in the day, using DOS on a machine with just a single floppy drive (no hard disk.) You'd insert a DOS disk, boot up to load DOS in memory, then remove the DOS disk and insert the disk with whatever program you wanted to run, like a word processor. IF/When the system crashed, you had to put the DOS disk back in and restart. I was working as a PC tech in a government office building, and I recall a crowd gathering to watch me install a 5MB hard disk. (Not GB. MB.) They found the amount of space that would have amazing, and most couldn't imagine what all that could be used for.
Lotus 123 and Word Perfect dominated office machines for a long while. I recall having Windows 1, and all it was good for was running the clock. I'd load 10 clocks on the screen and watch it. CPU was so over taxed that the hands of each clock had to move separately, and none could keep p with actual time, so the seconds hands would jump several seconds at a time. Windows 3.1 was the first actually useful version, but it was clearly running on top of DOS, as you'd often have to drop windows, get something done in DOS, then bring Windows up again.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane!
P-Code, under a Pascal runtime pseudo object intermediate bridge, did allow for many programs and San Diego State University was a big cheerleader for the code. It's interesting, as P-Code was a precursor to Bytecode.
Yes, the ability to just write a P-Code interpreter and implement some hardware-specific functions and get a full system with compiler and development environment allowed Pascal to spread over many mincomputers of the 70's and eventually the Apple II microcomputer.
It was available on the IBM PC, but by that time Turbo Pascal displaced it.
I was a young kid in a small town, and even I had Word Perfect.
The most serious dialup BBSs of the early 80s were RCP/M systems running RBBS. Wow, writing that sentence makes me feel old.
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Thank you for sharing that.
I remember that first Tomb Raider I think.
Our computer had Windows 3.11 at the time, but it came with some dos programs as well.
Glad you liked the video!
19:20 > Wasn't WordStar before? I just remember the secretary of a school in the middle 90s using it, when it was already Microsoft Word. She was really amazed from it and also used to the lot of key combinations she had to memorized
Wish there'd been something about DR-DOS, which for my money was always two steps ahead of MS-DOS.
I had a copy of DR-DOS 3 or 4, don't remember which. But mostly I used MS-DOS.
Agreed. Funny how the Great Innovator m$ always seemed to introduce new features into MSDOS - after DRDOS released them first. DRDOS 6 introduced all sorts of good stuff - that somehow then appeared in MSDOS 6.22. m$ was even sued for copying code and lost that case.
Anyway...
Quit using MSDOS once I got a copy of DRDOS 6. Best thing ever to run on an XT class machine if you had an expanded memory board. It could backfill and poke all sorts of things into upper memory and you could task switch applications.
It took me years to get over having to give up Qedit along with DOS (I think I was running DR DOS back then) when I was forced to switch to Windows by outside forces... I used both constantly back in the day. Throw in Desqview, and a couple modems and we had ourselves a 2-line BBS... Ah the good old days. It's weird that I can still remember my Fidonet address but ask me what I had for lunch yesterday and it's a crapshoot whether or not I could tell you.
☺ Glad you liked the video! There were a lot of great apps for DOS.
Great video, thanks for sharing 👍
I remember using a Spreadsheet called Twin, but it was a little unstable. Also liked Sidekick which was a memory resident utility and app launcher… Those were the days… Per (DK)
I loved As Easy As spreadsheet when I was at university (physics major). I used that for all my lab analysis - worked great! It was very full featured. If I didn't need to share spreadsheets, I think As Easy As could meet 95% or more of my spreadsheet needs today.
I actually have a spreadsheet called SC, Spreadsheet Calculator, installed my Linux PC that runs in bash. I believe it was ported from DOS. I intended to use it more when I installed it.
Dos was great to boot into to relieve overhead from windows for gaming but was also powerful for everything diagnostic. Fdisk, format, defrag, bootsector, scandisk, etc. I'm rusty so I forgot the actual cmds for all of them. You could literally do everything needed without a gui but the cmds could resemble shorthand by the time you had your flags & cmds typed out. I don't miss it.
My first job out of college the company used Wordperfect for dos still for some legacy tables and test processes. This was in the late 90's.
WordPerfect was a very powerful (for the time) word processor. Hard to use if you didn't have the keyboard template (and even sometimes if you *did* have the template) but it could do a lot.
Awesome documentary... thank you so much. I wanted to ask you please, can you tell us what kind of programs you made on MS-DOS? I'm a programmer myself, and I used DOS as a kid, and wrote stuff on BASIC and I really loved learning about all of the commands. I was always helping people install hard disks, or cd-roms, and then on Windows 3.1 I used Borland Delphi a lot, but I never got to learn actual real programing such as using assembly or C at that time. I did use BASIC a lot but that was on an MSX computer. So I'm very very curious about what kind of programs you wrote and how. I'm fulfilling my life long dream now and learning MS-DOS, C and Assembly, and I'm working on a VirtualBox machine for now on my MacBook. I bought a bunch of technical books on MS-DOS programming, and my goal is to learn how to program a driver. I'm not sure what I'm getting myself into LOL but it certainly feels so good. Please tell me more about what you did as far as programming, it would be super motivating. Thank you so much for this.
The programs I wrote for myself on MS-DOS were pretty simple but helped me to get stuff done.
For example, I didn't like certain DOS commands, so I made my own versions in C with new features, like a version of TYPE that converted text to upper/lower, converted tabs to spaces, etc. Or a version of DIR that colorized the output so it was easier to see what was there. Things like that.
I also made small utility progams that did specific, useful things. As an undergrad physics student, I wrote a lot of programs in FORTRAN77 .. and I might write that in a local editor, and then dial into the university VAX to compile it and run it. So I had a program that did certain checks for FORTRAN77 (like a primitive linter, but targeted specifically for me). That way, I spent less time dialed into the modem pool for coding and debugging, so I could use that time to just run my stuff and hang up.
When I started using LaTeX to write documents, I wrote a QBASIC program that prepped a plain text file for use in LaTeX. And when I started exploring nroff (see my other video) I wrote a program that converted my LaTeX files to nroff (if they didn't have equations).
And I wrote one-off programs to do data analysis for my physics labs (a lot of those) and do numerical analysis and numerical simulation.
These were not very sophisticated, just stuff that helped me do my thing.
@@freedosproject This is fantastic... I bet everything looks simpler to you when you have dedicated lots of time to understanding the subject. I will surely be watching all your other videos, I browsed through the channel and I saw many programming related ones (and ehem... gaming...) that I'd like to watch.
I know that the best way to achieve something is listening to those who achieved it so there you go, and your answering personally is extremely motivating to me so I appreciate that.
You'll keep seeing me around for a while hopefully, this is a lonnnnnng subject.
Drinking game: Take a shot every time he says "Rich command line experience".
Boy, does this bring back the memories.
I remained true to DOS until 1996 or 1997. Win 95 who?
Anyone remember the software suite Enable? The tetris-like game Lockout?
I just recently started to experiment with FreeDos, and I am hooked now. All I want to do all day is tinker around with it.
I am, however, as a beginner, experiencing a lot of issues, like how to transfer programs, drivers, etc., from my other computer, as I am still not familiar with how to adjust the USB port to be recognized by the system, and so on...
But in general, I wish I could have FreeDos as my daily SW in the future...
Welcome to FreeDOS! If you're running FreeDOS in a virtual machine, you should be able to "mount" the virtual disk from your "host" operating system (like Linux or Windows). I run Linux, and I use the guestmount command. I described it here:
opensource.com/article/21/6/copy-files-linux-freedos
But if your file manager "recognizes" the virtual disk image, you should be able to open it directly and copy your files. Just be sure the virtual machine isn't running, or it will mess up the data.
@@freedosproject thank you so much Sir! I will definitely look into this. Your explanations and channel, in general, are outstanding!
@@freedosproject I did it
You are a good man, and thorough.
I got to experience some DOS games as a 90s kid. I still think there was something special about those early games, probably the creativity and passion put into them.
But I also find it strange that many schools and businesses are still using price scanner UI and student gradebook UI that look like they came from the 1980s.
Good video. When I was very young (4 or less), we had a monochrome IBM clone with some version of DOS, I think: no GUI whatsoever, Math Blasters, and WordPerfect. I remember getting it out in the 2000s and messing around with it. It was frustrating seeing that C:\>_ just stare at you and having no idea what to do...
Now I run so many programs via a TTY in a Linux distro. I don't think I could go without multitasking.
Now that there's a PC/XT core in MiSTer FPGA there's going to be a lot more users using FreeDOS on XT class hardware.
That is a pretty advanced CP/M. Originally they had no concept of time. Many computers simply had no system that could tell the time or date.
There was MS-DOS before. For example MS-DOS 2.11 was popular. In the early days there were several MS-DOS machines that were neither BIOS nor hardware compatible with IBM PC so they could not directly run IBM binaries that for example accessed the screen directly but one could with relative ease port software to them.
I am old enough to remember the dawn of civilization. You typed cd...backslash and then something else... and wonderful things happened.
Glad you liked the video! 😃
Gary Kildall was the first to write an operating system for disk storage, Shugart, to be exact...for personal (single user) use. So arguably his control program for micros is the premier disk operating system. It was just as much written for an eight bit microprocessor from Intel. It was the first time eight bits controlled a disk that was designed for the mainframes of the day, disks being the cutting edge tech. Seattle QDOS was mainly an adaptation of Gary's DOS specifically for Intel's next generation 16 bit chip, which Gary was a little slow in developing. Seattle mainly wanted to sell hardware for the 16 bit chip. It could just as easily have been called COS, for Chip Operating System, or, operating system for the highest tech at the time. But that was Unix. What we are really interested in is what is the most advanced OS for the most advanced hardware...FOR THE MOST MICRO COMPUTERS at that snapshot in time. The most micro could be interpreted as the most personal at the most affordable for home use. What OS gives someone the most power from home with what was available at the time. As a hobby, it's a lot like classic cars. What, for example, is the most power you can still get given a Ford Model T. It's about hot-rodding a specific combo of hardware made available to home users. Hardware was always advancing faster than operating systems could be fully hotrodded. That is, if you were forced to live in a snapshot in time with hardware, but your software was still flexible, there is usually a lot more you would do, and could do, to make your system easier to use, more effective, more powerful, and, more profitable. Those systems could, after all, trade stock market (any market) algorithms very profitably....but few ever were. So, if it was 1983, and all you could afford was a monochrome monitor, two 5 1/4" floppy, 64k RAM and an 8 bit Z80 chip and a modem, what OS would you use to automatically log on to the bulletin boards once a day, get stock data, run some algorithms, and print out buy/sell recommendations that you would call in to a broker (better yet if also automated) to net average 100% per year with a max 25% drawdown and no losing months? This is STILL a thing. What OS, and what off the shelf apps, and what custom programs would you, or could you use to develop and implement such a return on investment? In 1983, you could have found such a computer (sans modem) running the latest OS from Digital Research CP/M 3.1, with an included bundle of software include Microsoft's Multiplan spreadsheet, and DR's CBasic and Graph... for $400 new, in a fire-sale.
I used PCWrite on DOS, did the job well enough and was shareware. Even bought copies of it for work, licensed.
Also used Enable 4.5 and before. Fantastic office app with SS, editior, DB, & more. I think the DB is better than MSO or LibreOffice (which I use). Enable's DB could do amazing things, and on limited hardware.
I still have the files to run PCWrite and Enable, but do not have the desire to go back to that hardware.
A lot of great shareware from the DOS era!
Great video and brings back a lot of memories. But, Quattro, while decent, never took any significant market share, at least in the US. Lotus stomped Visicalc (Visicorp had a lot of issues as a company) and owned the market until Windows 3. Excel was way ahead at the point since Lotus delayed a windows version for so long until it was too late. I used Lotus 1-2-3 (and AmiPro) until 2000 or so. It was a Windows version at that point was really dated compared to Excel.
Excellent! Thanks for all your work!
There's a lot of people who have worked over the last 28+ years to make FreeDOS what it is - I'm especially thankful for our kernel maintainers and command,com (aka "FreeCOM") maintainers and everyone who's worked on the distributions. They are the heart of FreeDOS. :)
My problem with FreeDos is that there is not enought support for having it in segments fitting on floppies for installation in legacy machines. if it was not such a pain to install on vintage machines, i'd gladly instally in on my 8088 which is my main computer for serious, focussed writing.
The FreeDOS 1.3 distribution includes a floppy-only mini-distribution. You can try it out right now in the FreeDOS 1.3 release candidate: www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.3/previews/1.3-rc3/
Look for the "x86" version, which contains floppy images you can use to install FreeDOS on a legacy machine.
@@freedosproject that great! i'll be sure to try it!
I would suggest connecting the drive from your PC to a more modern PC using some kind of adapter, and then install FreeDOS directly onto the hard drive.
Started with DOS 5.0 on our 386 and eventually ended on DOS 6.2 before transitioning to Windows 95. Good times.
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