7 ms·

What's interesting is that it seems to still be much less performant on very small systems than "commercial DOS". I have a kit-built machine with an 8MHz 8088-

by hakfoo 5y ago

What's interesting is that it seems to still be much less performant on very small systems than "commercial DOS". I have a kit-built machine with an 8MHz 8088-class CPU, and FreeDOS is much slower to boot than PC DOS 2000 (the final mainstream MS/PC DOS release). When I used it years ago on 486-class machines (distraction0-free laptops) the gap didn't seem so wide. Pity DR-DOS seems to have disappeared into the ether. It was a competent choice to, and I know there was a point where you could get a source distribution for embedded purposes, so you'd expect that the next logical step would have been crowdfunding a source buyout.

HeckFeck 5y ago
> I have a kit-built machine with an 8MHz 8088-class CPU Would you mind sharing details? I am curious. Is this a modern kit made from mostly new parts that is available to purchase?
- randombits0 5y ago
  Break out the soldering iron, Johnson, we have a clone to build! http://www.mtmscientific.com/pc-retro.html http://www.mtmscientific.com/pc-retro.html
- hakfoo 5y ago
  It's the EMM Computers board (www.homebrew8088.com). It's a little nicer than the PC-Retro because it has some concessions to modernity (PS/2 compatible keyboard port, ATX power connector and mounting design, uses a USB flash drive as boot medium) but there are some "work in progress" aspects (In the last few months, it's gone through a few hardware changes to make the speaker work and to support DMA) so there may be some compatibility holes.
marcodiego 5y ago
Boot time is not a good measure of performance.
- queuebert 5y ago
  Not for a data center server, no, but for an appliance it could be.
bitigchi 5y ago
You can open a bug report or post your findings to the mailing list.
Teknoman117 5y ago
I'm not all that surprised by freedos booting slower actually. It tends to be significantly more feature rich than the DOSes of the day, and as a result tends to be quite heavy for the 16-bit machines. My main wish for it would be serial console support. I have "old" industrial boards (386EX, 512K of non-expandable RAM, 8-bit bus, but made in '02). It has a BIOS and an in-ROM variant of DOS by a company called General Software. It has no built-in video hardware and uses a serial console by default.
- axiolite 5y ago
  > My main wish for it would be serial console support FreeDOS doesn't work if you put: ctty com1 in your autoexec.bat? Seems to be supported: http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Ctty http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Ctty Perhaps you need to modify the installer disk with that option, or install FreeDOS to disk on another system first?
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    I installed FreeDOS with a video card installed, added the ctty entry in autoexec.bat, powered down, and removed the graphics card. The FreeDOS kernel messages came out at boot (over serial), but when it got to command.com, it just started printing '.' characters to my serial console. To be fair, I really didn't spend much time debugging.
billforsternz 5y ago
Just speculating, but I think the reason for this is that MS-DOS was originally written on 4.77Mhz 8088 machines, both the OS itself and the core utilities, in assembly language. I know from my own experience that it's actually a perfectly fine platform, and you can write performant software that does simple things well. But if you take software written 15-20 years later, on much much faster 386/486/Pentium class machines in C and put it on those early boxes... Well, it's unsurprising it's not going to be performant on 8088s unless that was a specific goal that would absorb a lot of special effort.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Yes, pure assembler for the early versions of MS-DOS (and its precursors). Microsoft has open-sourced them: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS
  - temac 5y ago
    Late versions of MS-DOS are also full of assembly langage. Hell even QBasic and QuickBasic were written in assembly IIRC. There were a few tools in C though I don't really remember which ones; but the vast majority of the OS stayed written in assembly language.
- rnd0 5y ago
  >But if you take software written 15-20 years later, on much much faster 386/486/Pentium class machines in C and put it on those early boxes... Just for the sake of perspective: 15 years later, you had NT 3.51 running on pentiums with NT 4.0 coming just around the corner and Windows 95 had already been out for a year. 20 years later Windows XP was released and MS held an event celebrating the end of MS-DOS Even ten years later, you had Windows 3.1 running on 486s and OS/2 2.0 was a year away from release. So the 8088 and assembly window was really, really small. And people were over dos by the time Windows 3.0 was released (1990 -nine years after the first IBM PC)
  - rnd0 5y ago
    Correction; Windows 3.1 wasn't released until 1992 -eleven years later. So it would have been Windows 3.0 (probably in Standard or Enhanced mode) people were running in 1991.
anthk 5y ago
Vanilla FreeDOS loads up too much stuff. You can strip it a lot. Google/DDG some FreeDOS distros for 8086, which are many times slimmer than the former FreeDOS. https://svardos.osdn.io/ https://svardos.osdn.io/ Have fun.
alar44 5y ago
Here you go, dossrc.zip https://archive.sundby.com/retro/DR-DOS/ https://archive.sundby.com/retro/DR-DOS/
farmerbb 5y ago
> crowdfunding a source buyout Which could actually have been possible at one point, for the low price of $25,000: http://web.archive.org/web/20101011141137/http://www.drdos.com/products/buyout.htm?rnd=1079633491511 http://web.archive.org/web/20101011141137/http://www.drdos.c...
lproven 5y ago
> PC DOS 2000 (the final mainstream MS/PC DOS release). FSVO "mainstream". IBM released PC DOS 7.1 (with full FAT32 and LBA support) as a free download as part of its Server Guide Scripting Toolkit. It can readily be combined with the rest of PC DOS 2000 to yield a complete OS, comparable to "MS-DOS 7.1" extracted from Win98SE. I have described how to do this on my blog: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/59703.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/59703.html > Pity DR-DOS seems to have disappeared into the ether. It is still around, but Udo Kuhnt has, sadly, given up the Enhanced DR OpenDOS project. The boot floppies on archiveos.org are defective. I have fixed them, and posted disk images of them on my blog, too. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html > It was a competent choice to, and I know there was a point where you could get a > source distribution for embedded purposes, so you'd expect that the next logical step > would have been crowdfunding a source buyout. Strongly agreed. :-/
- hakfoo 5y ago
  My "Mainstream" was "It came as a shrink-wrapped bundle that had an instruction manual and CD, when I bought it at a computer swap meet ages ago." :) This makes me think it was actually targeted for some market intending to be used as a standalone OS. Mine didn't have a box, just the bundle wrapped, so I wonder if the use case was similar to how some OEMs ship FreeDOS for the "it has an OS for contractual reasons" purpose. You don't need a box if it's being slipped in the system packaging.
  - lproven 5y ago
    Ah, OK, that makes sense, then. As a counter-example: DR-DOS from Caldera or Lineo made it to v7.03, I think. Versions 7.04 through to 7.07 were finished, released and sold, but only as OEM products, bundled on bootable floppies containing Ontrack and Seagate hard disk toolkits, in Nero Burning ROM's bootable floppies and so on. (I suspect also in virus scanners, disk-imaging products, backup tools, etc.) Just the boot file(s) and COMMAND.COM. Given that a bootable diskette containing a disk manager was included with probably hundreds of thousands to millions of EIDE hard disks at the end of the 1990s... it's quite possible that more copies were ever shipped that way than were sold as standalone retail products. (Arguably, but IMHO: sad to say.) So by any reasonable definition, the "mainstream" version of DR-DOS might be the one bundled on maybe millions of bootable diskettes, and not the boxed product. I have no idea how many copied of PC DOS 7.1 IBM has distributed this way, and I bet it hasn't either. But I take your point, and I accept it. I just have a slightly different definition myself. :-)

by hakfoo 5y ago

HeckFeck 5y ago

> I have a kit-built machine with an 8MHz 8088-class CPU Would you mind sharing details? I am curious. Is this a modern kit made from mostly new parts that is available to purchase?

randombits0 5y ago
Break out the soldering iron, Johnson, we have a clone to build! http://www.mtmscientific.com/pc-retro.html http://www.mtmscientific.com/pc-retro.html
hakfoo 5y ago
It's the EMM Computers board (www.homebrew8088.com). It's a little nicer than the PC-Retro because it has some concessions to modernity (PS/2 compatible keyboard port, ATX power connector and mounting design, uses a USB flash drive as boot medium) but there are some "work in progress" aspects (In the last few months, it's gone through a few hardware changes to make the speaker work and to support DMA) so there may be some compatibility holes.

marcodiego 5y ago

Boot time is not a good measure of performance.

queuebert 5y ago
Not for a data center server, no, but for an appliance it could be.

bitigchi 5y ago

You can open a bug report or post your findings to the mailing list.

Teknoman117 5y ago

I'm not all that surprised by freedos booting slower actually. It tends to be significantly more feature rich than the DOSes of the day, and as a result tends to be quite heavy for the 16-bit machines. My main wish for it would be serial console support. I have "old" industrial boards (386EX, 512K of non-expandable RAM, 8-bit bus, but made in '02). It has a BIOS and an in-ROM variant of DOS by a company called General Software. It has no built-in video hardware and uses a serial console by default.

axiolite 5y ago
> My main wish for it would be serial console support FreeDOS doesn't work if you put: ctty com1 in your autoexec.bat? Seems to be supported: http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Ctty http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Ctty Perhaps you need to modify the installer disk with that option, or install FreeDOS to disk on another system first?
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  I installed FreeDOS with a video card installed, added the ctty entry in autoexec.bat, powered down, and removed the graphics card. The FreeDOS kernel messages came out at boot (over serial), but when it got to command.com, it just started printing '.' characters to my serial console. To be fair, I really didn't spend much time debugging.

billforsternz 5y ago

Just speculating, but I think the reason for this is that MS-DOS was originally written on 4.77Mhz 8088 machines, both the OS itself and the core utilities, in assembly language. I know from my own experience that it's actually a perfectly fine platform, and you can write performant software that does simple things well. But if you take software written 15-20 years later, on much much faster 386/486/Pentium class machines in C and put it on those early boxes... Well, it's unsurprising it's not going to be performant on 8088s unless that was a specific goal that would absorb a lot of special effort.

kingcharles 5y ago
Yes, pure assembler for the early versions of MS-DOS (and its precursors). Microsoft has open-sourced them: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS
- temac 5y ago
  Late versions of MS-DOS are also full of assembly langage. Hell even QBasic and QuickBasic were written in assembly IIRC. There were a few tools in C though I don't really remember which ones; but the vast majority of the OS stayed written in assembly language.
rnd0 5y ago
>But if you take software written 15-20 years later, on much much faster 386/486/Pentium class machines in C and put it on those early boxes... Just for the sake of perspective: 15 years later, you had NT 3.51 running on pentiums with NT 4.0 coming just around the corner and Windows 95 had already been out for a year. 20 years later Windows XP was released and MS held an event celebrating the end of MS-DOS Even ten years later, you had Windows 3.1 running on 486s and OS/2 2.0 was a year away from release. So the 8088 and assembly window was really, really small. And people were over dos by the time Windows 3.0 was released (1990 -nine years after the first IBM PC)
- rnd0 5y ago
  Correction; Windows 3.1 wasn't released until 1992 -eleven years later. So it would have been Windows 3.0 (probably in Standard or Enhanced mode) people were running in 1991.

anthk 5y ago

Vanilla FreeDOS loads up too much stuff. You can strip it a lot. Google/DDG some FreeDOS distros for 8086, which are many times slimmer than the former FreeDOS. https://svardos.osdn.io/ https://svardos.osdn.io/ Have fun.

alar44 5y ago

Here you go, dossrc.zip https://archive.sundby.com/retro/DR-DOS/ https://archive.sundby.com/retro/DR-DOS/

farmerbb 5y ago

> crowdfunding a source buyout Which could actually have been possible at one point, for the low price of $25,000: http://web.archive.org/web/20101011141137/http://www.drdos.com/products/buyout.htm?rnd=1079633491511 http://web.archive.org/web/20101011141137/http://www.drdos.c...

lproven 5y ago

> PC DOS 2000 (the final mainstream MS/PC DOS release). FSVO "mainstream". IBM released PC DOS 7.1 (with full FAT32 and LBA support) as a free download as part of its Server Guide Scripting Toolkit. It can readily be combined with the rest of PC DOS 2000 to yield a complete OS, comparable to "MS-DOS 7.1" extracted from Win98SE. I have described how to do this on my blog: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/59703.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/59703.html > Pity DR-DOS seems to have disappeared into the ether. It is still around, but Udo Kuhnt has, sadly, given up the Enhanced DR OpenDOS project. The boot floppies on archiveos.org are defective. I have fixed them, and posted disk images of them on my blog, too. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html > It was a competent choice to, and I know there was a point where you could get a > source distribution for embedded purposes, so you'd expect that the next logical step > would have been crowdfunding a source buyout. Strongly agreed. :-/

hakfoo 5y ago
My "Mainstream" was "It came as a shrink-wrapped bundle that had an instruction manual and CD, when I bought it at a computer swap meet ages ago." :) This makes me think it was actually targeted for some market intending to be used as a standalone OS. Mine didn't have a box, just the bundle wrapped, so I wonder if the use case was similar to how some OEMs ship FreeDOS for the "it has an OS for contractual reasons" purpose. You don't need a box if it's being slipped in the system packaging.
- lproven 5y ago
  Ah, OK, that makes sense, then. As a counter-example: DR-DOS from Caldera or Lineo made it to v7.03, I think. Versions 7.04 through to 7.07 were finished, released and sold, but only as OEM products, bundled on bootable floppies containing Ontrack and Seagate hard disk toolkits, in Nero Burning ROM's bootable floppies and so on. (I suspect also in virus scanners, disk-imaging products, backup tools, etc.) Just the boot file(s) and COMMAND.COM. Given that a bootable diskette containing a disk manager was included with probably hundreds of thousands to millions of EIDE hard disks at the end of the 1990s... it's quite possible that more copies were ever shipped that way than were sold as standalone retail products. (Arguably, but IMHO: sad to say.) So by any reasonable definition, the "mainstream" version of DR-DOS might be the one bundled on maybe millions of bootable diskettes, and not the boxed product. I have no idea how many copied of PC DOS 7.1 IBM has distributed this way, and I bet it hasn't either. But I take your point, and I accept it. I just have a slightly different definition myself. :-)