So, that gives me the opportunity to reflect on how I did my personal computing in the eighties and nineties. At that time, computer mice were around, however, nobody really knew what to do with them, even CAD was done with console input. Many of the structures and devices designed that way are still standing and/or in operation.
Back in the day, I used an 8088 with two 5in floppy drives.
Later, I was able to buy a no-name 286/287 based PC with a 20MB hard-drive. OS of the time was MS-DOS, I believe it was version 4.01, not sure about that.
Remember those time? You switched the PC on and seconds later, you could start with your work.
Latest advances in the FreeDOS project got me back to those times. Jim Hall started the project in 1994 and still keeps improving this opensource MS-DOS compatible OS.
Some hardware support of modern hardware is present already.
While FreeDOS can run in a virtual machine, I am personally more interested in running a native DOS PC.
Why DOS, you might ask yourself. One reason I mentioned above already. But, there are additional reasons such as
- easy administration and programming
- tons of old freeware and shareware available
- abandonware
- some commercial software being turned into freeware, e.g. OpenWatcom and Borland compilers
- one or the other software one has bought back in the day
In the next post, I will write about my first steps using mondern-ish hardware with FreeDOS.
