A few days late but still worth celebrating - from the FreeDOS blog:
Happy 23rd birthday to FreeDOS!
Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, I was a big DOS user. I used DOS for everything: writing papers for class, doing lab analysis, dialing into the campus computer lab. I loved the DOS command line. I considered myself something of a DOS "power user" at the time, and I even wrote my own utilities to expand the MS-DOS command line.
So I was a bit irritated in 1994 when Microsoft announced, by way of doing interviews with tech magazines of the time, that MS-DOS would soon go away. The next version of Windows, they said, would do away with MS-DOS. The world was moving to Windows. At the time, "Microsoft Windows" meant Windows 3.1, which was not that great.
I certainly didn't want to be forced to use Windows, not if version 3.2 or 4.0 looked anything like Windows 3.1. I believed I could be more efficient by typing at the command line, not by clicking around with a mouse.
So I decided to do something about that. We could create our own version of DOS, something that worked with programs meant for MS-DOS, but our DOS would be free for everyone to use. Other developers had done the same with Linux, I reasoned, so surely we could do it with DOS.
Twenty-three years ago today, on June 29 1994, I announced to an Internet discussion group what would become the FreeDOS Project:
DOS (acronym for Disk Operating System) has been with us for a long long time and still continues to be very useful. Most of my work with Linux is done with the command line except for some of the mapping software for digital ham radio.
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