hckrnws

And then there's PDOS (public domain operating system): https://www.pdos.org/

I used Novell DOS 7 back in its day and squeezed > 70 MB on my 50 MB hard disk drive thanks to its Stacker disk compression feature. I remember it coming in a flashy red colored box. It also supported to move most drivers into extended memory to have much more conventional memory available on 386 machines. However, most cutting edge games used DOS protected mode extenders already, so for gaming you couldn’t use that feature.

Great times, anyways. ;)

I remember a couple of friends using DR DOS in the 1980s. There seemed to be a disagreement about whether to pronounce it as /di ɑɹ/ or "doctor". (I realize it was named after a company and not after a doctor, so the former is more etymologically faithful.) Was there a standard among the creators or the user community?

Digital Research DOS. That's what I called it.

DiRe DOS :)

There is a precedent for "doctor", based on how people pronounced the company's "DR Logo"/"Dr. Logo"

> DR DOS® 9.0 is a faithful clean-room reimplementation

If this company now owns DR DOS, why do they need to do a clean-room reimplementation?

The About page mentions some form of ownership but doesn’t address that.

> …DRI continuing to publish updates until their sale to Novell in 1991. … DR DOS would change hands from Novell to Caldera in 1996, and again from Caldera to DeviceLogics in 2002.

> In 2022, Whitehorn Ltd. Co. acquired DR DOS and began the process of clean-room re-implementing this historically significant operating system.

The front page only mentions a “legally unencumbered” reimplementation but not how their acquisition was encumbered.

I think they only acquired the trademark, not the source code. But I‘m not sure.

It turns out the Documentation page addresses some of this, though not in detail. Scroll down to the FAQ section.

https://www.dr-dos.com/documentation.html

The Wikipedia page describes some past legal troubles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS

What this doesn't really address to me is why DR-DOS. That documentation uses a lot of flowery language to say nothing or close to nothing.

I'm too young to have used DR-DOS in anger (so I may be missing some key feature), but it seems like the entire point of DR-DOS would have been its source code legacy and accumulated feature set.

Here, my immediate question is why not FreeDOS? I'd guess it was system requirements, but according to the documentation DR-DOS 9 requires 2 MB of RAM minimum and a 386!!

I have used a DR-DOS 7 that was set up with a nice task switcher, between terminate-and-stay-resident programs ( not true concurrent processing ).

This setup started WP5.1, a spread sheet -- I think Lotus123, and a graphics editing program. I think it switches using cntrl and the F keys, similar in feel to how a linux machine switches consoles.

I think at the time this was set up, only DR-DOS could do the task switching. I don't know if that is still true.

MS-DOS/PC-DOS 4+ DOSSHELL has a task switcher.

I was a DR-DOS 6.0 user and it was great, 7.0 seemed to be worse. But by then I had moved to Coherent then Linux when MW closed down.

I will need to give DR-DOS a try.

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