Looking ahead to 30 years of FreeDOS

In a few days, 29 June, FreeDOS will turn 30. This happens to make it one of the oldest, continuously active open source projects in the world, originally created because Jim Hall had heard Microsoft was going to kill DOS when the upcoming Windows 95 was going to be released. After seeing the excitement around Linux, he decided it an open source DOS would be a valuable time investment.

I still used DOS, and I didn’t want to stop using DOS. And I looked at what Linux had achieved: people from all over the world shared source code with each other to make this full operating system that worked just like Unix. And I thought “If they can do that with Linux, surely we can do the same thing with DOS.”

I asked around on a discussion board (called Usenet) if anyone had made an “open source” DOS, and people said “No, but that’s a good idea.. and you should do it.” So that’s why I announced on June 29, 1994, that I was starting a new project to make an open source version of DOS that would work just like regular DOS.
↫ Jim Hall

For an open source implementation of what was a dead end and now is a dead operating system, FreeDOS has been remarkably successful. Not only are there countless people using FreeDOS on retro hardware, it’s also a popular operating system for DOS gaming and running old DOS applications in virtual machines. On top of that, many motherboard makers and OEMs use FreeDOS to load firmware update tools, and some of them even offered FreeDOS as the preinstalled operating system when buying new hardware.

With the ever-increasing popularity of retrocomputing and gaming, FreeDOS clearly has a bright future ahead of itself.