@jimfhall
| 6 min read
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and that meant I grew up with computers. Our first home computer was an Apple II, and my brother and I taught ourselves about BASIC programming on the Apple. I wrote a lot of games and math puzzles, because that’s really the limit of AppleSoft BASIC programming.
Later, our family replaced the Apple with an IBM PC, and I was excited to try the new DOS command line. DOS provided its own BASIC, but also a host of tools. Well, in those days “host” meant about twenty utilities, mostly to work with floppy disks and files. it wasn’t until MS-DOS 5 that I felt DOS had become truly “modern.” This version, released in 1991, replaced the venerable Edlin “line editor” with a full-screen interactive editor. It also included a completely new QBASIC programming environment and an incredibly useful DOS Shell that supported task-switching, a precursor to true multitasking.
And it was on this new system that I learned how to program in C and other languages. With this new knowledge, I wrote my own utilities to enhance the DOS command line, sometimes creating entirely new versions of existing DOS utilities with extra features and functionality. I felt like a true DOS “power user” and I felt very comfortable at the command line. I did much of my work on the command line, with my own tools to manage my directories and process files, but relying on my favorite DOS applications to write papers for class, or play games when I wanted to relax.
In 1993, I learned about Linux and considered this as my next “step up” from DOS. I installed an early Linux distribution on my little PC at home, but I couldn’t do away with DOS entirely. Linux didn’t have many applications in those early days, so I would frequently reboot into DOS to use my word processor or spreadsheet. I loved DOS, and relied on it.
So you might imagine I was a tad upset to learn in 1994 that Microsoft planned to “do away” with MS-DOS the following year. According to interviews in tech magazines, Microsoft’s next Windows version wouldn’t need MS-DOS, and DOS would effectively become a “dead” operating system. Everyone had to upgrade to Windows.
I’d used Windows by this point, and I wasn’t a fan. If you remember Windows 3 at the time, you know it wasn’t a great experience. I thought Windows was slow and unreliable. When a Windows application ran into problems, that one application could take down all of Windows. And I thought, “If Windows 4 will be anything like Windows 3, I want nothing to do with that.” So I decided to stick with Linux and DOS.
But if Microsoft was getting out of the DOS game, how could I keep running DOS?
I decided that if we were going to keep DOS around, we had to make our own. I asked around on Usenet, the forums or “message boards” of the day, and asked if anyone was working on their own DOS. The answer was “no,” but folks thought it was an interesting idea.
A few months later, on June 29, 1994, I made this announcement on comp.os.msdos.apps:
Announcing the first effort to produce a PD-DOS. I have written up a “manifest” describing the goals of such a project and an outline of the work, as well as a “task list” that shows exactly what needs to be written. I’ll post those here, and let discussion follow.
I called it “PD-DOS” because I wanted to create a DOS that was free for everyone to use, and I thought that meant “publ
