In 1994, several of us got together around a pretty neat idea. We liked DOS, but Microsoft was clearly moving completely to Windows. "The next version of Windows," they said, "would do away with DOS." We wanted to keep DOS around, so we decided to write our own. That project, announced 29 years ago TODAY on June 29 1994, was the FreeDOS Project. Thanks to everyone who is (or has been) part of FreeDOS! 29 years is a long time for any open source project, and I'm looking forward to more years to come.
I can't recognize everyone in one post, but it's because of people like Jerome, Ralf, Tom, Gregory, Eric, Tk Chia, Steffan, Bart, Pat, Aitor, Bernd, Wilhelm, Mercury, Michael, Paul, Liam, Bret, Rugxulo, .. and loads of other people who made FreeDOS what it is, and keep FreeDOS going. Thank you to everyone who finds and reports bugs, updates documentation, translates to other languages, fixes issues, adds new features, and writes new programs!
To celebrate our anniversary, I wanted to show that anyone can contribute to FreeDOS. It's not that hard to rewrite many the core DOS utilities, and you don't have to be an expert programmer to write your own versions of the basic tools. Check out this programming video {YouTube} to see a simple way that anyone can write their own programs that replace the standard DOS commands.
