Welcome to FreeDOS

If you are interested in BASIC programming, you may like to know that a new release of bwBASIC is available. From the announcement, this release is "mainly just bug fixes from the last 7 years. But there are new makefiles for new environments too. A prebuilt Win32 x86 executable is provided too." You can download it from Bywater BASIC at SourceForge.

We were sad to learn that Thomas Kurtz, co-inventor (with John Kemeny) of the BASIC programming language, recently passed away on November 12. Many of us got our start with computers by programming in BASIC. My early days of computing were on the Apple II computer, and I taught myself how to write programs in AppleSoft BASIC. Later, my family replaced the Apple with an IBM PC, and I learned IBM BASICA and GW-BASIC -- and much later, QBASIC on MS-DOS 5. BASIC holds a special place for many DOS programmers, and this is a deeply felt loss.

mTCP provides TCP/IP applications for your PC compatible retro-computers. Mike Brutman recently released a new version with bug fixes: "Version 2024-10-20 is available. It has a few bug fixes. It also allows mTCP programs to operate at the same time NetDrive is active. (If you know how packet drivers work, that is no small trick.)" The mTCP NetDrive programs are also now included in mTCP. (The mTCP NetDrive servers are still in a separate download.) You can download it from the mTCP website. Thanks Mike!

Make is a standard tool for developers, to automate when to compile or build new parts of the program, without compiling everything. This is extremely useful for large programs. Gregory Pietsch has started writing a new version. From the announcement: "This is my attempt at writing a better make for FreeDOS than all the makes out there. This includes dmake (a toy make) and even GNU make if I can. After two weeks of writing, I came up with this. .. Other PD versions of make use a singly linked list as the primary data structure. I wanted to get away from that, especially in places where I'd have to go over the whole list to find something. This version uses a map, with an AVL tree as the internal data structure. The program also uses dynamic arrays and dynamic strings to simplify the handling of macros." This is version "0.0" so is pre-alpha and "may be buggy, missing a few parts, or not have proper documentation, but at least it runs and could convince others that it could be something good." You can download it from /devel/make/make in the FreeDOS Files Archive at Ibiblio.

WDE is a modular disk editor capable of allowing users to manipulate data stored in various ways on different kinds of storage. The new version 1.1 was recently released, which includes these features: * fixed: mounting logical drives from image files didn't adjust the "last sector", thus cluster numbers beyond logical disk size weren't rejected. * fixed: if current device was an image file, hitting Ctrl-Enter while in sector 0 of a logical drive did switch to a real physical disk. * save file chain: last update date & time now copied. * cmdline option -n added. * file AND directory names are accepted. You can read the full release notes and download the new release from the WDE GitHub.

Lukas Kotek will give a conference talk about FreeDOS at this year's OpenAlt 2024 conference, coming up soon on November 3. From the session description: "The lecture will introduce the retro laptop Pocket 386 introduced this year (follower of projects like Book 8088 and Hand 386), for which the number 386 is not just a coincidence. What are its parameters? What can a laptop be used for? How will FreeDOS work on it with regard to the Czech environment? And what is this open source DOS-compatible operating system that is still being developed today? What are the real experiences after a few months of use? The lecture will provide answers to these and other questions, while the presentation will of course take place directly from the Pocket 386 laptop."