If you weren\u2019t around for the early PC era, or were a little more casual about operating systems, you could perhaps be forgiven for not knowing that DOS is not synonymous with MS-DOS. MS-DOS was just Microsoft\u2019s implementation \u2014 or rather, an implementation they purchased \u2014 of a Disk Operating System, one that was\u2026let\u2019s just say \u201cinspired by\u201d Digital Research\u2019s CP\/M.<\/p>\n
Digital Research shot back with DR-DOS, an operating system that was both compatible with and much superior in some ways to MS-DOS. The last version was released in 1991, after Novell bought the struggling Digital Research. Now it\u2019s back, or at least, it\u2019s on its way back with a fully clean-room implementation<\/a> by a fellow who calls himself [CheeseWeezel] on Reddit.<\/p>\n He\u2019s gone so far as to purchase the trademark, so this re-creation is the official DR-DOS<\/a>. In any case [CheeseWeezel]\u2019s DR-DOS is considered version 9.0, and is currently in Beta. The clean-sheet re-implementation of DR-DOS\u2019s API was sadly necessary due to the rather tortured history of the IP after DR was bought by Novel, who sold DR-DOS to Caldera, who briefly open-sourced the code before retracting the license and selling on. Some of you may remember a controversy where a previous rights holder, DR DOS INC, was found purloining FreeDOS code in violation of the GPL. Perhaps because of that, [CheeseWeezel] isn\u2019t using any old code, and isn\u2019t open-sourcing what he\u2019s done. Right now, the beta of DR-DOS 9 is free for non-commercial use, but as is standard for EULAs, that could change at any time without warning. [CheeseWeezel] is still working full compatibility, but at this point it at least runs DOOM.<\/p>\n Still, given the origins of DOS in Digital Research\u2019s early work on CP\/M, it warms the heart to see what many of us thought of as the \u201ctrue\u201d DOS survive in some form in the 21st century. Arguably it already had, in the form of SvarDOS<\/a>, but you can\u2019t use that to make smug jokes about your operating system having PhD instead of a measly master\u2019s. If you did not like DOS, we recall the joke from Mac users was that those were the degrees needed to operate the PC. Speaking of DOS, you don\u2019t necessarily need a retrocomputer to run it<\/a>.<\/p>\n Thanks to [OldDOSMan] for the tip!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you weren\u2019t around for the early PC era, or were a little more casual about operating systems,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,61],"class_list":["post-539013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}