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Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 18:04:51 -0700
From: Thomas A Webb <tawebb AT earthlink DOT net>
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To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: FreeDos
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Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com

Actually, that did happen. AT&T Bell Labs, rebelling aginst the 
proliferation of proprietary operating systems, developed Unix in the 
late 60s. Dos drew heavily on Unix for technology, amounting to a 
"simplistic single-user" version of Unix. There are many flavors of Unix 
around [Linux being one], and most are "source code compatible". If you 
install Linux in a form that basically provides the same capabilities as 
  DOS, it takes little mare space than MS-DOS, and runs a lot better.

I use FreeDos to manage the boot process for my distribution of Linux to 
avoid micro$oft spin on some machine bios chips. I find FreeDos to be a 
"work in process" as far as an OS is concerned, with wierd errors and 
very unfriendly error recovery. For my purpose, it performs well, but I 
wouldn't distribute it to users as an OS.

Robert Mergy Sr. wrote:
> There are operating systems that do have the ability to use an unlimited 
> amount of memory and can use disk space as memory also. They call this 
> vertual memory systems. DOS = Disk Operating System and is a markup 
> language to operate a disk drive, but is now evolving into a language 
> all it's own. I wonder if this is a good idea? I wonder if it is really 
> a good idea that we have created so many computer Languages? Why didn't 
> we just pick one and then enhance it over and over? Sort of allowing it 
> to evolve into an all purpose language. This would have made computing 
> so much simpler for everyone, NO?
> 
> 
> Jude DaShiell <jdashiel AT shellworld DOT net> wrote:
> 
>     That's a good thing I think. For one thing maybe all of the software can
>     be made to write correctly to the screen for screen readers and speech
>     synthesizers. Another worthy pursuit might be to make freedos
>     advantageous such that it wouldn't matter how much memory or disk space
>     was on a machine the operating system could use all of both if
>     that's what
>     the installer needed.
> 
> 
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-- 
Thomas A Webb
http://www.ospueblo.com - Open Source and Educational Resources
http://wordwonder.com - For Readers and Thinkers