News FreeDOS 1.4 released with updated FreeCOM, Install program, and HTML Help

[Admin]

The development of the FreeDOS marches onwards with an updated FreeCOM, Install program, and HTML Help system in version 1.4.

FreeDOS 1.4 released with updated FreeCOM, Install program, and HTML Help : Read more

 

[ravewulf]

Version 1.3 massively improved game compatibility but Phil's Computer Lab found a couple that still had issues. I wonder if that's improved? Pretty awesome that they include so many install methods

 

[abufrejoval]

Bah, I'll wait until DOS 2.5, that is supposed to have multi-tasking, just like MP/M!

 

[kerberos_20]

Bah, I'll wait until DOS 2.5, that is supposed to have multi-tasking, just like MP/M!

or you could just backtrack to win 9x, which at its core is just dos based virtual machine running bunch of type 2 windows/dos hypervisors, just remove windows code/gui and youll end up with dos multitasking enviroment

 

[TerryLaze]

Bah, I'll wait until DOS 2.5, that is supposed to have multi-tasking, just like MP/M!

It can run windows 3.1...all the multitasking you want.
It's extremely hard to do multitasking on a single console anyway, that's why MP/M was a multiUSER and not a multiTASKING os.

 

[abufrejoval]

It can run windows 3.1...all the multitasking you want.
It's extremely hard to do multitasking on a single console anyway, that's why MP/M was a multiUSER and not a multiTASKING os.

Yeah, my kids keep complaining about my jokes, too...

And while it was very late for April 1st, it wasn't at all serious, but a way to reminisce that there were days when DOS indeed was both "the hottest stuff around" in PCs and even had a future in terms of feature expansion. This was all well before even the 80286, let alone the 80386!

And yeah, there was MP/M, a multi-tasking and multi-user version of CP/M, which was in use before the IBM-PC even launched: plenty of S-100 systems out there used it to support businesses too big for a single microcomputer yet too small for a mid-range system.

I know it's hard to believe these days, but there was a lot of multi-user and multi-tasking going on with RAM sizes of 32-128K and certainly 640K would have been regarded as outrageous in an MP/M setup, most PDP-11 (mid-range) ran with less.

Microsoft did produce a multi-tasking DOS prototype with an internal version number of DOS 2.5. Somehow the company I was working at at the time had documentation, which I was given to read, but I don't think we ever had code for testing and it never left beta, instead the main focus of the next DOS release (3.0) became HDD support and the hierarchical file system (inspired by Xenix).

Digital Research also continued to make multi-user derivatives of their DR-DOS, mostly for embedded use and with GEM UIs, which I was also using for some of my projects back then, long before Windows ever became remotely usable..

 

[TerryLaze]

I know it's hard to believe these days, but there was a lot of multi-user and multi-tasking going on with RAM sizes of 32-128K and certainly 640K would have been regarded as outrageous in an MP/M setup, most PDP-11 (mid-range) ran with less.

Yeah my coding school had one class that was done on a single 68000 for the whole class, the same CPU my amiga 500 had at the same time.
No idea how much ram it had though.

 

[abufrejoval]

Yeah my coding school had one class that was done on a single 68000 for the whole class, the same CPU my amiga 500 had at the same time.
No idea how much ram it had though.

Well the 68000 had 24 address and 16 data bits, so 16MB was definitely the physical maximum, even with 32-bit registers. But top RAM chips were 64Kbit then and you ran out of space and money before those limits were reached.

We had a mostly home-grown multi-user Unix systems based on Motorola 68k at university, but that could have been a 68010, because the 68000 itself didn't yet permit page fault recovery e.g. with the 68451 external MMU. It crashed so often, it didn't last for long and became SunOS domain for a long time thereafter.

The first Unix I ever installed was actually Xenix on a 8086 with a discrete external TTL based MMU. Must have been in 1983 when I was doing an internship waiting for university to start.

I remember it ran Multiplan in multi-user, just like DOS 2.5 would have...