FreeDOS turns 25 years old: An origin story

[Abarbarian]

A couple of days late, but,

FreeDOS turns 25 years old: An origin story

June 29 marks the 25th anniversary of FreeDOS. That's a major milestone for any open source software project, and I'm proud of the work that we've done on it over the past quarter century. I'm also proud of how we built FreeDOS because it is a great example of how the open source software model works.

FreeDOS's Linux Roots

To get the FreeDOS project off the ground, I shared the DOS-like utilities and commands that I had written for myself. From there, other DOS developers saw what I had done, and they contributed their own programs and utilities. Others volunteered to write new programs, such as our COMMAND.COM shell ("FreeCOM"). Pat Villani contacted me to contribute his DOS-like kernel.

But, did you know that many of those original FreeDOS utilities had their roots in Linux?

 

[Ian]

I had no idea that FreeDOS had been around for 1/4 of a century - it must have been pretty difficult to get any open-source project off the ground at that time.

 

[Abarbarian]

I had no idea that FreeDOS had been around for 1/4 of a century - it must have been pretty difficult to get any open-source project off the ground at that time.

I recon the biggest difficulty would have been swapping information. Slow dial up, pony post , personal meets etc as there was not a fully functional WW back then.
I think it is great that folks have been colaborating for quarter of a centuary on an open source project for free. Especially as it's main use seems to be gaming these days.

4 cool facts you should know about FreeDOS

Play great DOS games

We know that many people install FreeDOS today to play the classic DOS games, run legacy business applications, or do embedded development. A lot of those people use FreeDOS just to play games, and that’s cool with us. Just because a game is old doesn’t mean it's boring. DOS had a lot of great games! Install your favorite classic game and have fun.

Because so many people use FreeDOS to play games, we now include a variety of DOS games. The FreeDOS 1.2 distribution includes first-person shooters like FreeDOOM, arcade shooters like Kiloblaster, flight simulators like Vertigo, and others. We aimed to include something for everyone.

About DOSGames.com

This website was founded in January 1999 and since then has provided an archive of free (shareware, freeware, etc) games for the MS-DOS platform. Nowadays DOSBox provides an easy way to play these games on modern computers. If you're interested in learning about the history of this website, see the About DOSGames.com page.

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