Notices by The FreeDOS Project (freedosproject@fosstodon.org)

Sad to learn that Thomas Kurtz, co-inventor (with John Kemeny) of the BASIC programming language, recently passed away on November 12.

I got my 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.

If you missed my talk at #Nerdearla yesterday, here's a link to the video:

https://youtu.be/czMxt-wW_Y0

In English with a brief intro in (my very rusty) Spanish, plus Spanish subtitles.

LOOKING FOR OPEN SOURCE PROJECT MAINTAINERS for a roundtable discussion about how to help with documentation in open source projects. I'd run the roundtable as part of an article around Oct 20, like this one from last year:

https://technicallywewrite.com/2023/10/20/roundtable

This roundtable will be maybe 20-30 mins. Open to large and small open source projects, well-known or obscure, even single-developer projects

Email me at jhall @ freedos . org if you are interested.

PLEASE SHARE!

Edlin is a classic editor from the early DOS days, but it’s still a fun and useful editor. Here's a hands-on intro to editing with Edlin:

https://www.both.org/?p=7385

I use Edlin when I want to write something quickly, like a test program or a brief note.

Edlin is also very useful if you want to capture some commands into a FreeDOS batch file— you can write the new batch file while any commands you ran are still visible on the screen.

Thanks to Lukáš Kotek for this article about how to use FreeDOS with Fedora Linux, using QEMU.

https://mojefedora.cz/fedora-qemu-freedos-legacy-computing/

If you'd like to see a demonstration of how to build MS-DOS 4.00 using FreeDOS, here's a video to do that.

This runs Linux commands that fix the source code — the GitHub version stripped CR/LF to just LF, and mangled some CP437 characters. Then the build runs fine.

Thanks to FreeDOS developer E. C. Masloch ('ecm') for providing these fixes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7r76V_gWQ8

@mmu_man @devrandom Yup, we already shared a news item about it on the website
https://www.freedos.org/

FreeDOS will be 30 years old in June!

We announced FreeDOS on June 29, 1994 … which makes us older than Amazon, Wikipedia, and Google.

I wrote a lot of code early on, but these days I'm here to support others who write the code.

I was honored to be interviewed by My Open Source Experience podcast about supporting an open source community. Thanks for the great interview!

https://youtu.be/qYux4Q1vxJ4

https://josem.co/the-beauty-of-finished-software/

I liked this article about Finished Software, and the WordStar example. That was from an era when online updates and patches weren't yet a Thing. Once you shipped that version, that was it.

My favorite Finished Software is As Easy As spreadsheet on DOS. Very solid, no issues.

But I'd say many DOS programs were that way too. What was your favorite Finished Software?

FYI: I'm in the middle of the website move, and something got stuck.

Right now, you can visit http://www.freedos.org/ and see the new website, but https://www.freedos.org/ (note the "https" instead of "http") is showing an error. So something didn't get updated for https when the move happened.

I have a support ticket open for the site hosting folks to fix this.

@clacke Yes, exactly. VisiCalc couldn't do it, you had to tap the ❗ key until the numbers stopped changing.

Lotus 123 could do it.

LANPAR did it by default in 1969, ten years before VisiCalc, but it was basically a compiler so that's not surprising.

@trilobyte It's amazing that VisoCalc invented many of the standards that continue today, especially A1 addressing.

When I show my students the history of spreadsheets, I start with VisiCalc.

But VisiCalc can't do forward referencing. I'll show that in the next video. That's why there was the recalc key shortcut.

We take fwd ref for granted today, not there in VisiCalc. (To be fair, it would have been a big performance problem on the Apple II.)

@goosey @brouhaha

It gets better with background: At the time, say you wanted a change in your company's budget software, it would take months to implement on the mainframe (programming, etc)

For those who could get it, LANPAR was huge because you could make your own budget plan in a weekend.

When VC came out, loads of companies bought Apple II computers just to run VisiCalc. Because now you could make your own budget plan in an afternoon.

@brouhaha Yes! I highlighted that to my students and they were surprised

First desktop spreadsheet: VisiCalc on Apple II (1979)

First computer spreadsheet program: LANPAR (1969)

So I also teach this university course about the history of technology, where students also learn how to use spreadsheets.

This semester, some of my students were surprised to learn that (a) spreadsheets existed before Windows 🤨 and (b) even a DOS spreadsheet could do everything we learned on the modern spreadsheets, just differently in some cases.

In this demo, we'll compare LibreOffice Calc on Linux and Quattro Pro on DOS.

https://youtu.be/Z5LXMpcZjEw

@allison I agree! 👍

A lot of "features" now are old features on a faster CPU.

Some of those labs are kind of basic spreadsheet stuff, but some are pretty advanced, especially if you haven't used DOS spreadsheets before. 🤩

*where this comes from:

I sometimes teach university classes, including an "intro to tech" class that includes how to use spreadsheets.

I have some labs I'd like to do with DOS spreadsheets. 😎

I'm thinking about doing some videos where I show that yes, you can do the "modern" spreadsheet stuff on classic DOS spreadsheets.

And I do love a good DOS spreadsheet. ❤️🤓

Very exciting news! Dave Dunfield has decided to release the source code of over 40 years' work "in the hopes that others may find it useful or maybe learn a few things." This includes the Micro-C compiler, a very nice C compiler for DOS.

You can find everything on Dave's website.
https://dunfield.themindfactory.com/dnldsrc.htm

The source code license isn't an "OSI open source" license, but aims to release the source code for others to use. Thanks Dave!