On 1/23/2013 11:42 AM, Jim Hall wrote: > Hi. teogum replied to your other email on this topic, but here's my > contribution. > > Today, FreeDOS is often used by three types of users: > > > 1. People who want to play old DOS games > 2. Developers, to run embedded systems > 3. Businesses, to run legacy DOS software
I would add a fourth category to that - people who maintain old IBM compatible PC hardware for their hobby, which is usually vintage computing. If we split hairs too much there could be an infinite number of users, but I think that group is large enough to stand alone. I might also add a fifth group - people who need a minimal bootable system to apply BIOS or other firmware updates. We get a lot of requests on the mailing lists for people looking to put FreeDOS on USB sticks, and often it is for this purpose. > There aren't usage numbers for FreeDOS like you can get for Windows or > Mac, which typically equate to "numbers of licenses sold" or "number > of Macs sold". But I can tell you about how many times the FreeDOS > distribution was downloaded. I've been keeping track of downloads > since the FreeDOS 1.1 release in January 2012. > > We're seeing 40,000-42,000 downloads per month over the last few > months. Here are the number of downloads of the FreeDOS distribution > per month in 2012: > <snip> > > And so far in January 2013, we have had 22,991 downloads of FreeDOS > 1.1. By the end of January, that should be almost 31,000 just for > FreeDOS 1.1. > > > -jh > I am surprised that there are so many downloads. When you think about the number of copies of PC DOS and MS DOS copies floating around, that makes for a *large* number of DOS users. Most of which are probably occasional users, but still that is very impressive. Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnnow-d2d _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
