On Sun, 13 Jul 2014, Michael B. Brutman wrote: > Tightly integrated protected mode support basically leaves 8088 or 80286 > class machines behind. Which seems fair given that those machines are > 25 or more years old now but a big "market" for running any form of DOS > is to support old hardware. So a new version of FreeDOS that does not > work on that hardware limits its reach. (I suspect that those machines > would be perfectly happy remaining frozen in time, running an earlier > version of FreeDOS so this may not be a real issue for them.)
I personally believe FreeDOS really needs to be able to run anywhere MS-DOS 5 can run; anything else will leave users on MS-DOS or PC DOS who would otherwise prefer to switch. But I get the feeling that most people who still work on it, they work on it for DOSEMU - for running on top of another OS, on relatively modern 32-bit and 64-bit hardware, not running on metal on XTs and ATs. > I don't think there is any point to adding new features to FreeDOS that > older applications can not use. If you go down that path then you have > to start modifying applications. Then you might as well decide on a new > toolchain, other kernel upgrades that we need, etc. and then we are off > on a new OS hobby project. We all know how successful those turn out. And then it wouldn't really be DOS anymore. > FreeDOS needs to embrace the retro-computing crowd; they have the > hardware that needs things like FreeDOS and the spare time to play with > it and push the limits. QFT. e> My personal plans ... > > I'm trying to make network programming under DOS easier by providing a > pretty complete framework for doing it. I've also picked my projects > carefully to be both useful and to try to grab some attention to show > that DOS, although not current, is still capable of some pretty neat > things. The PCjr running a web server under IBM DOS 3.3 serving most of > the content on brutman.com is a good example of this. It gets people > thinking "Wow, DOS can do that? On that level of hardware?" I sometimes do the same with my 5160; I have an IRC client written for it that runs on DOS. Experiments show that it ought to run on a PC with 256K and DOS 2, that's pretty lean. But that's my mentality - the functionality I need, in a light package - the binary's 75K and supports utf-8 translation (a must for my usual haunts), color, and basic CTCP (though no DCC, multiwindow, or anything fancy). I recall that you too have an IRC client, though with different goals, and different functionality. > At some point I'm going to tackle the kernel and get FreeDOS running on > a PCjr. That will make FreeDOS appeal to at least three more people. ; > - 0. I used to run it on a Tandy 1000 HX. xD -uso. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
