4 ms·
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.
by WalterGR 7mo ago
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.
- Tomte 7mo agoI think they only acquired the trademark, not the source code. But I‘m not sure.
- WalterGR 7mo agoIt 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 https://www.dr-dos.com/documentation.html The Wikipedia page describes some past legal troubles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS
- spijdar 7mo agoWhat 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!!
- RobGR 7mo agoI 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.
- jasomill 7mo agoMS-DOS/PC-DOS 4+ DOSSHELL has a task switcher.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]