On this day in 1994, a physics student at the University of Wisconsin River Falls shared an idea. The dominant PC operating system at the time was Microsoft’s MS-DOS, yet Microsoft had announced that the next version of Windows would mean the end of MS-DOS. In response, Jim Hall posted a new project on the comp.os.msdos.apps discussion group on Usenet:
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.
That “public domain DOS” or PD-DOS idea quickly became popular, and developers from around the world began contributing source code. The project changed its name to FreeDOS weeks later, and released its first Alpha release a few months after that, in September 1994.
The FreeDOS Project has been partially hosted at SourceForge since 2000, including source code, bug tracker, email lists, and wiki.
Today, the FreeDOS Project turns 24 years old. That’s a long time for any open source software project. Congratulations on this anniversary!