Old fashioned: I work in DOS for a complete day

Old school: I work in DOS for an entire day

(credit score: Sean Gallagher)

Replace, July 5, 2021: It is the July four vacation weekend within the US, which implies Ars employees will get a well-deserved vacation to make amends for this summer time’s Steam sale (or possibly simply to relaxation). As such, we’re resurfacing a number of classics from the Ars archives, together with this considerably masochistic experiment. Again in 2014, Ars’ Editor Emeritus Sean Gallagher determined to have fun the 20th anniversary of MS-DOS’s end-of-life by working in the working system inside a contemporary context. It… went about as easily as you’d count on.

Now 27 years after Microsoft introduced that it will finish help for the MS-DOS, we’re resurfacing this train (and really a lot appreciating our current day choices as all of us earn a living from home a bit extra). This story initially ran on July 3, 2014, and it seems unchanged under.

Twenty years in the past this week, as Microsoft introduced that it will finish help for the MS-DOS working system, James Corridor introduced to the world that he supposed to create a public area model of the OS with a view to maintain the universe of character-based DOS software program alive. Corridor’s “PD-DOS” venture ultimately turned FreeDOS, which right now helps an ecosystem of builders, retro avid gamers, and diehards who will surrender their WordStar if you pry the floppies from their chilly, lifeless fingers.

In tribute to the venture’s 20 years (and to these courageous souls who maintain the DOS fires burning), I made a decision to spend a day this week working in FreeDOS. I arrange a machine operating the most recent distribution of the OS together with software program from the FreeDOS Bundle Supervisor repositories. I then added no matter different software program I might scrape collectively—open supply software program, freeware, and “abandonware” discovered on the Internet, plus some software program graciously despatched by Lee Hutchinson from his personal private reserve of DOSware. I wished to know if it was doable to do trendy Internet-based work in DOS—and simply how painful it’d show to be.

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