FWIW, I think one niche is allowing tech-oriented youngsters the opportunity to rediscover the agony and ecstasy of finally getting a balky DOS application to run in the allotted RAM: one of my nephews showed me, with much pride, that he had finally got a free DOS clone running in an emulator on his iPhone, and was running Win95 on top of that.
I was duly impressed, though I was not surprised, since iOS is a FreeBSD-based OS. Now that most of DOS apps can be described as legacy code apart from a few here and there still writing for DOS, FreeDOS is not only a guilt-free alternative to MS-DOS, it's also a good training ground for writing small-scale apps and OSes. Every University with an intelligent Computer Science dept., should expect third-year students to write an application or utility that will run on FreeDOS or RxDOS, just to get them thinking of cutting memory footprint: because there's a whole lot of embedded environments out there, and training Java and C# does not train anyone to handle memory constraints very well - if at all. Just my 0.02c Wesley Parish Quoting Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com>: > Hi, > > On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 4:04 PM, Charles Belhumeur > <chbelhumeur2...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > I'm thinking more and more there's no big niche for FreeDos. > > The niche is running legacy software from ye olde days (or similar). > > > Too many problems trying to get it to do the tasks people > > want to do on their boxes these days, surf the web, play media and > > games. It all takes sophisticated hardware and Intel chips in real > > mode just aren't good with the new hardware. > > > > I think the mistake LINUX and Windows make these days is loading > every > > damn driver on the hard drive at boot time and all these other > > processes like clipboards, print spoolers, caches etc. Then wankers > > who write apps with background update processes and the like. > > In fairness, I think FreeBSD can customize most things like that in > /etc/rc.conf (or whatever). It's got a relatively small footprint and > doesn't even come with X11 (installed) by default. Though I haven't > tried 10.0 yet. (FYI, I don't think DOSEMU works there anymore, dunno, > but BOCHS or similar should be supported via ports.) > > > Were I to design an OS these days I'd likely go with a 32 or 64 bit > > version of a DOS or VAX like OS and design it from the start to be > > configurable for different tasks. Keep it simple and load only what's > > needed with better integration of the pieces. > > > > It all boils down to this What do people want to do with their boxes? > > Will this OS make it easier simpler for them to do it? > > A year ago, you humorously said, "I always point out Einstein to the > wankers." And I mentioned Oberon. Well, let me quote from Wirth's > latest report: > > http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/Oberon07.Report.pdf > > " > The Programming Language Oberon > Revision 1.10.2013 / 10.3.2014 > Niklaus Wirth > Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler. (A. Einstein) > " > > And the reason I mention this is because he just turned 80, and yet he > still updated his _Project Oberon_ book (OS + compiler) to use Xilinx > Spartan-3 FPGA with his own custom "RISC" processor. > > http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.html > > Since you like simplicity, you'll probably like looking at that > (though I admit to not having tried it myself yet, though I see > there's a third-party RISC emulator for running atop Windows now). > > --------------------------------------------------------------- > --------------- > Put Bad Developers to Shame > Dominate Development with Jenkins Continuous Integration > Continuously Automate Build, Test & Deployment > Start a new project now. Try Jenkins in the cloud. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/13600_Cloudbees > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net /lists/listinfo/freedos-devel > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Put Bad Developers to Shame Dominate Development with Jenkins Continuous Integration Continuously Automate Build, Test & Deployment Start a new project now. Try Jenkins in the cloud. http://p.sf.net/sfu/13600_Cloudbees _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
