Guest post: Hobby programming with FreeDOS

Dr Owain Kenway responded to the FreeDOS Blog Challenge by sharing his story about installing FreeDOS on a netbook, so he could do more hobby programming. You can read Owain's story here:

FreeDOS - Not just for updating your BIOS »

Owain uses his FreeDOS laptop to write interesting Fortran programs, and has a photo of Conway's Game of Life, and a snippet of code from a program to calculate Pi. And as someone who used to write a lot of programs in F77 (my first compiled language) it was great to see Owain's samples.

In reading Owain's story, I especially loved his description of how modern we've made the latest version of FreeDOS (I credit the many folks who helped assemble the FreeDOS 1.2 distribution):

Well it’s mostly a machine for doing some hobby programming in Fortran. It is ideal for the task as it’s extremely portable, but also because it’s stress and distraction free: I don’t have twitter in prodding me in the background. No e-mail or youtube videos to distract. I don’t really have to worry about security or updates as it’s not connected to any networks. Instead I can focus on writing code.
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Perhaps the biggest surprise is how modern and easy to use the system is for software development. The workflow for coding on the machine is different from what I do on Linux only in that I don’t have git available. Even though I’m using compilers from the 90s, a user interface from the 80s and Vim. Both FreeDOS’s shell and 4DOS have tab completion (although it works differently from bash). If you really need them, Unix-style tools are available. Watcom’s wmake is a fairly adequate implementation of make. As a result I’ve tackled my first largish F77 project (I’ve always used F90 + whatever add-ons the compiler I’m using has) pretty successfully

Thanks, Owain!