What a beautiful project…In 1994, Jim Hall, at the time a Physics student at University of Wisconsin-River, was shocked at Bill Gates announcement that the soon-to-come release of Windows 95 would toll the bell of MS-DOS maintenance investments.

A poor hacker then, Jim Hall took the lead of the DOS-lovers wave and started programming a DOS-like operating system. Soon joined by hundreds of programmers worldwide, who have been working for about a decade, FreeDOS has just released its open-source, 100% re-written version of MS-DOS.

Although not MS-DOS proficient at all, I can understand the use of it: we all have dusty x86 machines somewhere in the basement. Rediscover Doom, Dune, Civilization and Alone in the Dark, or programming in Pascal or Fortran again for a few days can probably be insightful on the use of computers and its impact on Society – and remind you of some good memories.

Have a look at the FreeDOS project website. They’re still looking for programmers to polish their current version of DOS by the way…

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