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.

[...]

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