sorry freeDOS doesn't get the recognition it deserves, great project!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wow. What a heroic effort. Love to see you still passionate about this project. People like you help keep free software alive. Big cheers.

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..

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.

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).

I honestly want to thank for all the work You did put into the project!

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.

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!!

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

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Thank you for the great presentation. Really great to get a historical view on DOS origins and development.

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!

Awesome. Brought DOS memories flooding back.

Great video, thanks for sharing 👍

Awesome video. And I like the direction of FreeDOS 1.3. Cheers!

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!

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.

Excellent! Thanks for all your work!

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.

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.

I had the Star package on my Kaypro. Very nice. Thanks for the video.

30:24 Count me among those who are running FreeDOS on a 486. I have FreeDOS installed on an IBM ThinkPad 701C.

You are a good man, and thorough.

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 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

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.

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.

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

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!!!!

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.

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.

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.

Very interesting! Thanks!

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.

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

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.

The picture of the TRS-80 brings back memories. I was a Radio Shack store manger in Maryland during that time.

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 🙂

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 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.

It would be fun to add the Concurrency that Gary Kildall added.

Nice presentation! Tip: You should have put the dates of release of each DOS, so that the user could follow the history better.

KZfaq just pushed this video to me in my list, nice stuff ! Desqview was my jam. Open to use DOS in 2023

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.

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.

My favourite thing about WordStar was the devs had a sense of humour - the command ^KY was “clear entry”

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).

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.

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.

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.

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...

fantastic video

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.

Dos and gwbasic was how I started in programming in the early 90s

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.

"..a message board called Usenet." Lol! Love the grossly succinct description.

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.

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!

I wasnt even aware that DOS was still in use, thank you for this enlightenment

Thanks for sharing. 😉👌🏻

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.

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.

Interlnk and intersrv were just plain handy. I just know at some point in time I was glad I was able to copy stuff through the printer or serial ports with the right cable if the other computer I was playing with didn't have working drives.

Word Star was used in the `80's to teach typing/keyboarding. - That, at least, was what I learned with.

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.

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!"

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

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.

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.

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.

RT-11 is the PDP OS, you're thinking of, I think. Very DOS and CP/M like.

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.

How great you’re bringing this information back into view. I’ve been programming assembler with a friend electronician to develop a pcb with a microcontroller for stand alone machine use. We used XT and AT PC’s running on MS DOS. What a great time that was (1997). Since the factory producing RAM memory burned down somewhere in Asia the year before we also had to write programs to address extended memory and a floating point integer imitating reals. Thank you for this, it was a nice look back.

I was a young kid in a small town, and even I had Word Perfect.

Totally amazed that FreeDOS 1.0 postdated XP.

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.

I got through college with a PC XT clone running DOS with Quattro Pro, Wordstar, and QuickBASIC 4.5.

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.

Wish there'd been something about DR-DOS, which for my money was always two steps ahead of MS-DOS.

I ran Supercalc CP/M on a Zenith Data Systems Z80

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...

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.

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.

dosShell was the best! dropdown menu awesomeness!

18:37 fun fact, excel to this day has a Lotus123 compatibility mode

Hi, good video What about a video on DOS file managers (with split screen, and all other functions just, or not, included in W10/11) ?

21:30 The Mac had 128K of RAM, but significantly had 64K of ROM that included the QuickDraw stuff and much of the operating system functions. This saved on RAM needed by the OS, and significantly saved room on the boot floppy.

DOS's UI was readily inspired by systems like TENEX, keeping the similar forward-slash for commands, and command names.

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)

Started with DOS 5.0 on our 386 and eventually ended on DOS 6.2 before transitioning to Windows 95. Good times.