In this article, FreeDOS Project founder Jim Hall shares his thoughts on the past, present, and future of the FreeDOS Project — a complete, free, MS-DOS compatible operating system. Hall writes . . .

“In 1994, DOS was still a popular operating system. It was simple, straightforward and stable. At least, DOS was more stable than Windows 3.1. I had grown attached to DOS and I enjoyed having it available. There were lots of programs written for it. I used DOS to do my data analysis for labs, write papers and physics reports, dial into the University network, and write small, helpful programs.”

“Yet, there were rumors from Microsoft that they were planning to do away with MS-DOS, and replace it with Windows. (This was, of course, the promise of Windows95.) When Microsoft said they were going to drop MS-DOS in favor of Windows, it struck a chord with DOS users. We didn't want to give up DOS. I noticed questions on newsgroups like comp.os.msdos.misc asking if there was some other DOS alternative. DR-DOS was one possibility, but who could say if even DR-DOS would survive in an age of Windows?”

“On the DOS newsgroups, people starting asking if anyone had started a free DOS, something similar to Linux, which was already popular on many university campuses . . . For a few months I watched the same question come up on the newsgroups: “is there a free DOS I can download?” No one had answered the question, which implied that there was no such thing as a free DOS . . .”

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