Guest post: First contributions to FreeDOS

Gregory Pietsch shares his story about how he contributed first contributed to FreeDOS:

I stumbled across FreeDOS around 1998 or so. At the time, I was familiar with MS-DOS, having used it since 1985 or so, and thought, "Okay, this group wants to build a GPL'ed clone of MS-DOS, it shouldn't be too hard." I decided to contribute a couple of programs. One of them, named "Code", is an encoder/decoder for uuencode/uudecode/xxencode/xxdecode. I thought it was useful.

A few years later, I got more ambitious. I wanted to get something in the Base distro with my name on it. I noticed that base was missing a version of Edlin, the line editor from the early days of MS-DOS. I figured, who cares if nobody uses this program anymore, that's my ticket into Base. Of course, I had to write it along different lines than the original. The original was in tight Assembler, so I wrote mine in C. After several false starts and a week of programming, I finally had something that was usable, and sent it in as FreeDOS Edlin 1.0.

Since then, I have debugged FreeDOS Edlin when I've needed to and attempted to add internationalization to it with varying degrees of success. I also made it easy to take apart. A programmer could use the back end of Edlin as the back end of Edit or reuse the string and array handling bits if they wanted to.

Also, every time I upgraded Edlin, the new version came with a note written by me from the perspective of a TASS editorialist proclaiming that Edlin was the linchpin holding FreeDOS together. It was the least I could do.

By the way, the development environment I use for this and other programs nowadays is Cygwin. That's why FreeDOS Edlin is successfully autoconf'ed. I figure, is there an easier way to make a distribution than "make dist"?

-Gregory Pietsch