People sometimes ask me what I'd love to see in a future version of DOS. I would like to see some level of running multiple applications at once. The difficulty will be maintaining compatibility with older DOS applications; DOS was not originally designed to support more than one active application (excluding TSRs.)
True multitasking would be ideal, but I'd be happy if we supported the simpler "task switching" - this would be a huge leap forward for FreeDOS. MS-DOS5's DOSSHELL supported hotkey "task switching" and a welcome addition. But we need this at the kernel level to be really powerful.
But so far, I've only mentioned incremental changes to the FreeDOS paradigm. Let's think transformatively: throw off the chains of 8088 backwards compatibility, and look to the modern systems!
What would you change in a "next generation" version of FreeDOS to make it stand out?
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About Me
- Jim Hall
- I'm Jim Hall, the founder and Project Coordinator for the FreeDOS Project. I started FreeDOS in 1994, when I was an undergraduate physics student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Other developers got in touch with me, and we began work creating our own version of DOS that would be compatible with MS-DOS. I shared the extended DOS utilities that I had written for myself, as did others. We also found public domain or open source programs that replaced other DOS commands. A few months later, we released our first FreeDOS “Alpha” distribution. And from there, FreeDOS grew into what you see today!
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