Reviving old tools and games with FreeDOS

What's Old Is New

Article from Issue 234/2020
Author(s):

The FreeDOS Project turned 25 years old this year. We'll show you why a free version of DOS is still cool in 2020.

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, I was a great fan of MS-DOS. Our family had a PC at home, and I grew up writing my own programs and tapping out commands on the DOS command line. I considered myself a DOS "power user." I even wrote my own programs and utilities to enhance and expand the DOS command line.

In Spring 1994, I was finishing my junior year in physics at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. It was around this time that I started to read articles in trade magazines where Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows would do away with MS-DOS. Have you used Windows 3? I found it to be clunky and slow, no match for MS-DOS and the stable of mature DOS applications and utilities. I decided that if Windows 4 would be anything like Windows 3 (Figure 1), I wanted nothing to do with it.

Figure 1: The author found Windows 3 clunky and slow.

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Download Article PDF now with Express Checkout
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subscriptions
Digital Subscriptions

Related content

  • Introduction

    This month in Linux Voice.

    more »
  • QEMU System Emulation

    Do you ever wish you could run Linux within Linux? Or how about DOS within Linux? QEMU is an open source application that lets you emulate a complete hardware environment within your Linux system.

    more »
  • Bringing Back the '90s

    People born in the late '80s and early '90s often have a sizeable collection of old video games gathering dust at home. Systems capable of executing these are, however, becoming scarce. This article explores the options for archiving old PC games and running them on modern systems.

    more »
  • iPXE

    iPXE simplifies the task of booting images over a network and also lets admins design dynamic boot menus that integrate scripts and boot images via HTTP(S).

    more »
  • catgets

    To make programs useful to a worldwide audience, you need to build in support for multiple languages. Catgets is a tool that helps you reach beyond your mother tongue.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Mobile Programming Security Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source