Slashdot: Interview: FreeDOS Leader Jim Hall Answers

“While it is very nice to have some sort of non-MS DOS
available (at least for us gamers), it still basically 15-20 year
old technology. How much longer do you think DOS, or DOS emulation,
will be necessary?“

“Jim: I think DOS will be around for quite some time yet. DOS
remains a great environment to work in if you are building an
embedded system, for example. The operating system is light, so it
will run well in a device that doesn’t have a lot of memory. You
can burn it into ROM, boot from a floppy, or a small micro-drive.
There aren’t many operating systems that you can find these days
that will boot from a floppy, yet still leave you enough room on
the disk for your embedded program and maybe some room for data
files.”

“I think the embedded systems market is one of the markets that
will keep DOS alive, at least for several years to come. (Exactly
how many years that will be is hard to guess. Yoda: “Always
changing is the future.”) Look at some of the alternatives that you
have today if you want to build a small embedded device: DOS,
Windows CE (and there’s a reason they call it “wince”), or an
embedded Linux (ala Elks). Look at it a little more closely, and
you’ll see that if space becomes an issue for you, DOS is really
the only way to go. Linux and Windows both require too much
overhead to build an efficient embedded system.”

Complete
Story