FreeDOS 1.1 released after 17 years

Some 17 years after its first release in 1994, and more than five years since 1.0, FreeDOS 1.1 — the definitive, open source version of MS-DOS — is now available to download.

The history of FreeDOS stems back to the summer of 1994 when Microsoft announced that MS-DOS as a separate product would no longer be supported. It would live on as part of Windows 95, 98, and (ugh!) Me, but for Jim Hall that wasn’t enough, and so public domain (PD) DOS was born. Other developers quickly jumped on board, a kernel and utilities were made, and a usable version of PD-DOS began to emerge. It wouldn’t be until 1998 that the first alpha build (version 0.05) was released, however; a very slow trend that would continue, with a slew of betas culminating in a final 1.0 build in 2006, some 12 years after the project begun. Eventually, it would be renamed FreeDOS.

When I tell the story of FreeDOS to my friends the next question is usually: “So, like, what’s the point of FreeDOS?” — a fair question, given the maturity of Linux and its massive support framework. Well, for a start, FreeDOS is already extensively used by recovery disks. If you’ve ever made a boot disk for the sake of checking your hard disk or memory, or fixing a broken installation of Windows, you probably used FreeDOS.

Beyond that, though, FreeDOS is actually a very good environment for educational or simple systems. Linux, compared to MS/FreeDOS, is very fat. When combined with QBASIC or DJGPP (a C/C++ development environment), FreeDOS makes a surprisingly good development platform. It’s also important to point out that FreeDOS isn’t actually an “old” operating system: It supports FAT32 (with LBA) and UDMA for hard drives and DVD players, and the FreeDOS distro comes with an antivirus scanner and a BitTorrent client. USB support isn’t quite there, but USB keyboards, mice, and external storage can be finagled into working.

When it comes down to it, though, the reason I like FreeDOS is that I can run it inside VirtualBox and play Doom. With a burst of nostalgia, I can fiddle around with HIMEM and EMM386 and Autoexec.bat to eke out just enough conventional memory to play Cannon Fodder. Ultimately, though, with DOSBox providing a much better (if less real) gaming experience, I would have to admit that FreeDOS is mostly just a curio for old-timer geeks.

FreeDOS 1.1 released after 17 years