I'm looking for a recent and free version of DR-DOS.It's kind of complicated, and if I have this right:Digital Research made CP/M which was popular, but IBM didn't like the DRI terms and picked Microsoft to develop PC-DOS for them. This was based on 86-DOS formerly known as QDOS. Eventually IBM agreed to sell CP/M for PCs and DRI priced CP/M-86 at 4x the price of PC-DOS or MS-DOS.
Defence; What is DRDO’s inertial guided bomb and how it will boost India’s defence capability India successfully test fired last week an indigenous 'inertial guided bomb' joining a select few countries such as the US and Israel to possess this capability. DR-DOS is an MS-DOS compatible operating system from Digital Research that evolved from their earlier CP/M-86 based products Concurrent DOS and DOS Plus. In 2002 Lineo was bought out. Former employees created Devcelogics LLC that continued to sell DR-DOS for use in embedded systems. In 2004 Devicelogivs released DR-DOS 8.0.
Eventually they saw that this wasn't working and made an MS-DOS compatible OS called DR-DOS. Eventually it rocked with a GEM interface and all that. But none of that mattered.Now DRI was sold to Novell when Novell decided they needed to kill Microsoft because Windows 3.1 supported incompatible networking.
This had nothing to do with Digital Equipment Corporation suing Intel and winning but loosing so much money it had to sell things to. Intel, because despite the name, DRI was not owned by DEC. And so Novell released Novell DR-DOS 7. Since they also got involved with Linux and other stuff they got bored of DOS and sold it to Caldera.When Windows 95 wouldn't run on DR-DOS, Caldera sued Microsoft. I think they sort of won that one with a settlement. Caldera thought they could do more with DR-DOS if it was open sourced. So they released OpenDOS and Caldera Open DR-DOS.
This was released as versions 7.01 and 7.02. Mysteriously they decided to not make 7.03 open source. And then they thought it made more sense on embedded devices and moved it to a division that became Lineo.Lineo released a couple versions of 'Caldera' DR-DOS 7 too.
They might have been kinda buggy. Lineo sort of collapsed, and metamorphosed into DeviceLogics which released DR-DOS 8.Now the confusing parts are:. What happened to 8? At drdos.com you can only get 7.03 and it costs money?. What happened to the source for 7.01 and 7.02? And also the binary distribution?. What's different in 8, and 7.03 that would be missing from the Open versions?.
All this aside, are any of these version better than FreeDOS is now? The best answer is given by the:In 2002, Lineo was bought out, andsome of Lineo's former managerspurchased the name and formed a newcompany, DeviceLogics.
They havecontinued to sell DR-DOS for use inembedded systems. DR-DOS 8.0 wasreleased on 30 March 2004 featuringFAT32 and large disk support, theability to boot from ROM or Flash,multitasking and a DPMI memorymanager. This version was based on thekernel from version 7.03. Thecompany then split into DevicelogicsInc. And DRDOS Inc, which releasedDR-DOS 8.1 (with better FAT32 support)in autumn 2005. This version was notbased upon version 8.0, but was acomplete rewrite.
Both 8.0 and 8.1have now been pulled (because of thediscoveries outlined below), andreplaced with Caldera DR DOS 7.03.Aside from selling copies of theoperating system, the DR DOS Inc.website lists a buyout option for DRDOS; the asking price is $25,000.The OpenDOS 7.01 source code is stillactively being developed by TheDR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project,founded in July 2002 in an attempt tobring the functionality of DR-DOS upto parity with modern PC operatingsystems. The project's efforts haveresulted so far in adding nativesupport for large disks (LBA) and theFAT32 filesystem. There were alsoseveral other enhancements, includingimproved memory management and supportfor the new FAT+ filesystem extensionwhich allows files of almost 256 GB insize on normal FAT partitions. Theproject remains in active developmentas of 2008.In October 2005, it was discoveredthat DR-DOS 8.1 included severalutilities from FreeDOS and othersources and that the kernel was anoutdated version of the EnhancedDR-DOS kernel.
Failed tocomply with the GNU General PublicLicense (GPL) by not crediting theFreeDOS utilities to their authors andincluding the source code. Aftercomplaints from FreeDOS developers(including the suggestion to providethe source code, and hence comply withthe GPL), DR DOS Inc. Instead pulledall 8.x versions (including theunaffected DR-DOS 8.0) from theirwebsite.
DR-DOS is a popular PC operating system that was originally created and developed up to version 6.0 by Digital Research. After the demise of Digital Research, it was acquired by Novell who released version 7.0 as Novell DOS 7. Despite being a commercial success, Novell lost their interest in the further development of DR-DOS and in 1996 sold it to Caldera, who changed the name to Caldera OpenDOS 7.01 and released the source code of the kernel under an Open Source license. Subsequent versions were named DR-DOS again, but unfortunately, the development model was changed back to Closed Source. Caldera Thinclients, a subsidiary of Caldera which later renamed itself to Lineo, continued the development of DR-DOS as an OS for embedded systems, before they abandoned its development in favour of Linux. The current owners of DR-DOS, Devicelogics, acquired it in November 2002 and promised to produce an 8.0 version of DR-DOS for the embedded systems market, which was released in March 2004.In July 2002, when the commercial development of DR-DOS was stagnating and the last official version had been released three years ago, I decided to continue the development of DR-DOS as an Open Source operating system. Since the source code of later versions was not freely available, I used the source code of DR-DOS 7.01 alias OpenDOS as a base for my work and started to write my own set of patches for it.
Thus, The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project was born!Like the name states, the aim of this project is to enhance the capabilities of DR-DOS/OpenDOS 7.0x and to add support for new standards. In the course of the first two years, the project reached many of its short-term design goals, including native support for large disks (LBA) and the FAT32 file system, and it became a bigger success than I had ever hoped, last but not least thanks to the support from the DR-DOS community!Like other, similar projects, it strives to achieve compatibility with most existing software written for DOS. Unlike these, however, it will not stop there.
The long-term goal will be to gradually evolve DR-DOS into a modern PC operating system with all features that one would expect of one of these, but hopefully without the weaknesses of other existing next-generation PC operating systems. How long it will take to achieve this goal remains to be seen, but I am confident that it will become reality.- Udo KuhntDownloads.