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This last week the old disk operating system for IBM-compatible PCs, FreeDOS, turned 23 years old. Jim Hall, who started the project, writes the following:
On June 29, 1994, I made a little announcement to the comp.os.msdos.apps discussion group on Usenet. My post read, in part:
Announcing the first effort to produce a PD-DOS. I have written up a "manifest" describing the goals of such a project and an outline of the work, as well as a "task list" that shows exactly what needs to be written. I'll post those here, and let discussion follow.
He is collecting stories about how people have been using FreeDOS and will do so until the middle of July.
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You're currently going through a difficult transition period called "Life."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nerdfest on Sunday July 02 2017, @02:12PM (3 children)
Whenever I need to run a BIOS update, it's a life saver (unless it's one of those "Windows-only" type of utilities).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @12:27AM (1 child)
Yup. Here, you want the OS to concentrate on the -one- task, do it right, and wait to be told to do something else.
those "Windows-only" type of utilities
If there is a time when a multitasking OS is more inappropriate, I can't think of it.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @08:01AM
Not even that.
You want the OS to get out of the way and not interfere with anything. Which DOS really does excel at. Probably the only time BIOS update software even uses DOS is to read the file containing the new BIOS code. Once that is read into RAM[1], the rest of the update process might as well have been started directly from the boot loader.
[1] Well, there was that one HP BIOS update that read the file containing the new BIOS while it was writing it, instead of reading it into RAM first. When it got a read error from the floppy drive half way through, the machine became unbootable. Which was positive in our case, since the only reason we were updating the BIOS was to satisfy level 1 support (did you try rebooting, updating the BIOS,...) before getting an RMA number to send it back for a replacement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @10:12AM
That certainly will end as UEFI takes over. Unless someone writes an UEFI bootloader emulating BIOS (is that actually possible?)