In light of the "DOS was dead" discussion, I wanted to ask a question. I was *born* after support was dropped for MS-DOS, so I can't claim nostalgia as my reason for use. Recently I installed FreeDOS on my modern HP-Pavilion laptop, alongside BSD, Linux, and plan9. I did this because I like DOS's speed and assembly programming. It worked fine after I fixed the beep bug with your help. So my question is, why do YOU use FreeDOS? Is it primarily nostalgia? Legacy program support? Speed? Note that I don't consider running legacy software a bad reason. I was shocked by how much good software has been "thrown away" because of its age. On Linux all my favorite software (vi, siag office, twm, motif &c.) was written before I was born. However, that is not my primary reason for using FreeDOS. my primary reason is because it is like the motorcycle of operating systems. It is lightweight, has no red tape to cut through to do things, and is monotasking. (Monotasking is also why I don't use it as much as I would like to, but why I use it at all.) I figured that if I had a different reason than what everybody assumes, that some of you might as well. Everyone seems to assume that DOS is used by people who are unable to cope with progress and have to run their ancient version of word perfect. If that is your reason, it is not a bad reason. I was thinking of eventually writing a 64-bit dos work [sort of] alike eventually, but it would not be able to support legacy programs due to segment offset addressing and a million other things.
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