DOS (without or with older hardware) is great for hardware hacking, e.g. it's trivial to write code to directly access hardware and find out how it works; the i

DOS (without or with older hardware) is great for hardware hacking, e.g. it's trivial to write code to directly access hardware and find out how it works; the information can then be used to e.g. implement a linux driver. Note that performance is also very good as well, e.g. for bit-banged I/O just disable interrupts for minimal latency and maximum throughput. Also for simple network-attached embedded devices that have to be ultra-reliable, there isn't much to go wrong.