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Comment by edem | Hacker News Reader

How is this useful in 2016? I'm genuinely curious.

DOS was and is an absolutely tiny operating system. The job of an OS is to act as an intermediary between you and the hardware.

Sometimes, having stuff between you and the hardware is a problem. DOS lets you basically just use the hardware directly, so it can make sense for some types of control systems or firmware updaters.

It's really not ideal for either purpose, though. Control systems can use a much richer RTOS rather than building on DOS and implementing an RTOS within the application. Firmware updating only happens on DOS because Microsoft isn't interested in accommodating that use case with Windows. It is increasingly common to see firmware update boot images based on Linux, which has no trouble offering access to those low-level interfaces while still having a modern feature set.

There is also a historical significance this and things like DOSbox may prove useful in the future given ever lengthening copyrights.

Perfect is the enemy of good, as the saying goes...

A lot of new PCs in my (highly piratey) country come with FreeDOS pre-installed. You won't see them in retail stores, but they're offered for a significant discount online, even from major brands like Asus and Lenovo.

I have taken advantage of these offers several times to avoid buying a Windows license for a computer I intended to run Linux on, or to install a different version and/or language of Windows than the one the manufacturer offered by default. Sometimes I even buy Windows separately at additional cost, just to avoid the bloatware and spyware.

I have several theories about why manufacturers choose to do this instead of just leaving the disk unformatted or using a proper user-friendly Linux distro. By having another O/S pre-installed, they can claim that they are giving consumers a choice rather than outright encouraging piracy. But since most people who buy these PCs put pirated Windows on it anyway, they don't want to pre-install anything that they might need to support seriously. This means using a minimal O/S that "just works" but one that nobody is actually going to use as a daily driver. FreeDOS fits that bill, whether the developers like it or not. I'm grateful that it exists.

Are they cheaper than the equivalent computers with Windows?

Typically yes, because the price does not include the cost of a windows license. This article has an illustrative screenshot: http://fossforce.com/2016/12/foss-dos-21st-century-hardware/

That's interesting. I remember that back when you could buy a computer without an OS, it cost more than with Windows.

Yes, they've had deals with OEMs like that https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-investigated-in-europe/

> Novell complained in 1993 that Microsoft blocked competitors out of the market for operating system software by way of certain anticompetitive practices. It criticized Microsoft's standard agreements for licensing software to PC manufacturers, which required payment of royalties based on the number of computers shipped, regardless of whether the computers contained preinstalled Microsoft software

> After intense negotiations, Microsoft agreed to change some of its license contracts through the year 2000.

It can still cost more, if the OEMs made deals to pre-install crapware (those antivirus trials and such).

Good point!

I imagine installs in high-piracy nations aren't terribly valuable to crapware peddlers, because they rely on enough people buying something from them to recoup their costs.

These days you don't need to buy Windows separately just to get rid of bloatware: you can just download a clean image from Microsoft [1].

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/

First off, DOS has very direct hardware access. This means it works very well in more embedded environements. It also means it's just flat-out fun to hack on for some sorts of people, for much the same reasons that, say, ITS was fun to hack on (although no ITS user would ever admit to liking DOS, obviously)

Secondly, FreeDOS is useful for bringing a semi-modern operating system to your 486 or whatever, without it being unbearably slow: breathe some life into the thing.

Finally, legacy software. DOS has a massive library of some of the finest software ever conceived: games in particular. Doom, Quake, Duke3D, Wolf3D, King's Quest, Monkey Island, Myst, Lemmings, Dune II, Descent, various Infocom games, and far more that was less widely ported than the above and hard to play nowadays.

Lemmings originated on the Amiga, iirc.

First level on PC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ9CS0KUZvY

First level on Amiga 500:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZ-zeVJCxw

Anyways, to elaborate a bit on what you stated. It was common back then that games came with driver libraries rather than having them installed on the OS.

Effectively each game took over the PC for the duration of play, and if it crashed you reached for the ever so useful reset button.

Quake for example had multiple versions. The original one that used software rendering. One that was custom built for 3DFX cards (assets now owned by Nvidia), GLquake that used OpenGL, Quakeworld for playing online (different network code to be less sensitive to latency etc), and the list continued on.

Quake 2 had a in-game toggle between 3DFX, PowerVR, OpenGL and software render.

>Lemmings originated on the Amiga, iirc

I think you might be right. I was confused because it was made by DMA Design, who would later rise to prominance on the PC (I know what you're thinking: what could possibly be more prominant than Lemmings? To which I answer that DMA Design is still around: However, they are now known as Rockstar. Yes, that one).

>Anyways, to elaborate a bit on what you stated. It was common back then that games came with driver libraries rather than having them installed on the OS.

True, although my point was merely that there were many excellent DOS games that haevn't been ported to other systems.

until a few years back, my company still owned some old scientific equipment whose software ran on DOS.

we've still got equipment which is controlled by software that runs on XP (and does not work on anything else). i should probably donate a bit to ReactOS, because i expect i'll need it sooner or later.

these sorts of projects can keep perfectly good, old equipment running and useful. (and considering the aversion some physical scientists have to computers, save drastically on training costs.)

What about WINE?

I would assume driver issues, which can be taken care of in ReactOS (which is meant to be a reversed-engineered windows kernel) but not in Wine (userspace)

For me, WINE is preferred because Microsoft Office ran better on WINE last time I check.

You could run XP in a virtual machine. Bonus is that it will portable when and if you upgrade the machine.

Older XP supposedly has a real time mode that got dropped in vista. If that's what they're using then a VM won't work.

Are you sure? I don't recall XP being real time of any kind, as it was designed ground up to be general purpose and specifically did not try to incorporate real time.

I do remember some sort of extension that could install drivers that made it behave like a real time OS. However at that point I think seperating the control out to seperate hardware with a real time OS seems like the obvious choice, and then keeping the interface on a genereal purpose PC. Though it wouldn't be the first time a vendor made a stupid choice.

The NT kernel has realtime scheduling priorities. It's not fully guaranteed though, and if a program with realtime priority hogs all the cores, you're screwed.

Unlikely that this just works. T&M equipment was often not based on standard motherboards, even in the XP-firmware era. For example on some scopes there were parts on the mainboard that interfaces a proprietary interconnect to PCIe of the CPU/NB; the mainboard itself was kind-of-but-not-really µATX.

Some more recent designs seem to be standard µATX with standard PCIe, though, so these should be possible to use with virtualisation and the mandatory IOMMU for the proprietary hardware (Feature locks / DRM might be cranky, tho).

And before the mainstream OS era these were usually 100 % custom jobs, completely unlike a PC. 68k, MIPS, PPC, and even proprietary designs were used.

it was reported to us by the support folks that the software wouldn't even work in windows 7's XP mode, which as i understand it, is VM-based.

but, they said, "don't worry, we'll keep supporting XP!"

...right

They can support it all they want, but unless they want to produce hardware, it's very hard to replace a pc with one that can run XP at all.

It has a lot of uses here and there. A ton of companies use it as the OS for their hardware diagnostic packages, or for things like firmware updates. It claims very little of the hardware for its own, so it makes it a lot easier to do things like low level format a hard drive without having to worry about some other driver/process messing with things.

One interesting exception is Apple, who's Hardware Diagnostics disc runs as an EFI binary (why boot another OS when you have one in ROM already?)

Modern firmwares update via UEFI capsules, which are universal across operating systems.

Or, rather, independent of an OS.

Haven't been to HMV in about 5 years, but all the point-of-sale computers ran DOS at the Montreal locations I'd been too.

Went to a local bookstore recently, seemed they were running a DOS app too.

So unless they are emulating (a distinct possibility), they can use FreeDOS to run natively.

And if not for enterprise-sake, then just for fun :P

They might be OS/2 --- in text mode, it looks just like old fashioned DOS. Apparently lots of ATMs still run OS/2.

I have it on an super old desktop with even older serial adapters so we can maintain an ancient piece of machinery that nobody has a plan how it works.

Additionally, some OEMs will ship PC/Laptops "without OS" which usually means "FreeDOS preinstalled"

I still use it infrequently for firmware updates for certain hardware that's only delivered as DOS executables. I also needed to deploy such an update to a large number of embedded systems and ended up pxe booting freeDOS (not challenging to setup, but pxe booting DOS seems a little humorous). FreeDOS is a lot nicer to deal with than DOS or DRMK.

I'm not sure if this is "the" DOS used[1], but MS forces a contract on vendors saying that they can't sell a server without an operating system, as basically a way to help force out ^nix (vendors don't want to support a full-blown ^nix, so don't want to ship one). However, FreeDOS is an operating system with extremely limited functionality - there's nothing to support. This gives those vendors an 'out', so they don't lose clients who don't want to pay for MS licenses.

[1] I think it's FreeDOS that's an option on servers, but I can't recall. I've been cloud-ey for too long :(

Wasn't that part of the anti-trust lawsuit?

No, i think that was about them bundling IE with Windows and claiming they were joined at the hip.

That said, i think MS since then changed their tactic to offering deep bulk discounts. In particular when the OEMs pre-installed both Windows and Office.

This because the margins pr PC had become so thin that the way the OEMs make a profit is to charge third parties like Symantec a pr PC fee on bloatware bundling.

Used to perhaps, but no longer.

I regularly order machines from dell with no OS on them - its just not available retail.

When I bought my current PC (custom assembled for me from parts I chose) a few years ago, they installed FreeDOS on it. It booted all right from SSD and could DIR onto 37" LED TV.

for running firmware updates for some (older) devices

Or not so old devices...

Yes I use FreeDOS on a USB flash drive to run BIOS updates on current hardware.

Or those who run non-vendor-supported OS on their computer, FreeDOS is often their only way to upgrade BIOS/UEFI.

FreeDOS doesn't work on computers with UEFI

FreeDOS doesn't work on computers without a PC BIOS; there's a difference. Look up 'Compatibility Support Module'.

Gambling machines are one niche that, last find I checked, still used it a lot.

Depends on whether one's utility function definition, includes the nostalgia parameter

install onto a stick or disc for server firmware upgrades.

"but the cloud..."

someone maintains that cloud, every day.

But why not Linux in that situation?

(Not to talk the project down, it's great. But I don't think anyone wants to depend on it for system recovery)

because manufacturers still provide dos .exe's for flash updates.

Because shockingly the vendors still ship driver updates in dos compatible form and not linux in my experience. Last time I did BOIS/RAID driver updates, I was glad I could boot to DOS using a USB stick and not have to revert to a USB-to-floppy converter + floppy.

this.. I wanted to upgrade an old bios recently and intel only provided an exe

I had to re-install osx on my sister's machine and the osx download and install thing in the firmware can't install osx from the cloud any more and it's only been 5 years or so!

> someone maintains that cloud, every day.

Why i did a double take when i ran into the claim of being "serverless" while checking out a web framework. Holy buzzword bingo, Batman...

I occasionally play Dave using it. :-)

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