Oct 14, 2026, 4:24 PM- Oct 14, 2026, 4:24 PM
Replies
Cogito Ergo DisputoDisputatore@masto.ptOct 14, 2026, 4:52 PM@randogoth do you use it? I'm guessing no, but I want facts.
- Cogito Ergo DisputoDisputatore@masto.ptOct 14, 2026, 4:54 PM
@randogoth ok, so "I want facts" may come out as aggressive and that wasn't the intention. I mean that I prefer facts to guessing
- Oct 14, 2026, 4:58 PM
@Disputatore no offense taken. I will definitely try it out. I've been running the open source version of it for a bit: http://svardos.org/
- Cogito Ergo DisputoDisputatore@masto.ptOct 14, 2026, 7:18 PM
@randogoth I'm curious about why you are playing with those limited OSes.
- Oct 14, 2026, 7:34 PM
@Disputatore a mix of nostalgia and fascination: they come from an era where machine resources were sparse and devs had to be creative to deal with the limitations. That's peak software engineering imho. Look at the stunning works the demoscene and game developers produced that fit on a floppy disk. Compare that to a 1GB printer driver your OS downloads...
- Cogito Ergo DisputoDisputatore@masto.ptOct 14, 2026, 8:48 PM
@randogoth interesting. I learned to program in the MS-DOS era. I don't remember feeling the memory constraints. It was interesting to program the whole GUI, but I don't feel the call to go back. So I'm not a programmer anymore, maybe that has something to do with it.
But I have a similar feeling re ZX Spectrum games. When I see something related I feel the warm inside, but when I really think about it, most games were depressing. Looking at the limited colour schemes, some games were awful.
- Cogito Ergo DisputoDisputatore@masto.ptOct 14, 2026, 8:54 PM
@randogoth some of the classics are still great: Manic Miner, Chucky Egg, 1942, but there is so much crap...
Mattforelioned@mastodon.onlineOct 15, 2026, 12:32 AM@Disputatore @randogoth I think it harks back to simpler times.
linear cannonlinear@nya.socialOct 14, 2026, 5:32 PM@randogoth@mas.to ok but why would i upgrade from my actual copy of Novell (DR-)DOS 7 that has FAT32 support and TaskMAX and a long history of working with existing DOS software, to this thing that doesn't have those things, seems to be entirely unrelated, and is probably vibecoded from scratch after this "Whitehorn Ltd. Co." managed to get rights to the name?- linear cannonlinear@nya.socialOct 14, 2026, 5:38 PM@randogoth@mas.to if this is actually someone's passion project then that's cool i guess, but from an outside perspective this looks like someone is just trying to use brand recognition to draw attention to something that does not appear to be what it is implied that it is
Oct 14, 2026, 5:33 PM@randogoth There is some doubts as to if this is connected in any way to the actual historic DR-DOS operating system; beyond the name/trademark. The about page admits this is a "re-implementation".
Which in 2026 feels at risk of being vibe coded.
EDIT: Mostly stating this for anyone like me; who was briefly excited by the idea of the original being resurrected.
Nina Kalininanina_kali_nina@tech.lgbtOct 14, 2026, 5:38 PM@trashheap @randogoth they seem to have over 1000 revisions over 9 months. It's possible for someone working full time on such a project, but it's hard to say
- Oct 14, 2026, 5:41 PM
@trashheap which in itself isn't per se a bad thing if done right by engineers. Assembler debugging is very likely more efficiently done by an LLM. Having worked on some DOS software myself lately I have to admit without coding agent help I would have thrown my computer out the window after hours of trying to dig through interrupt docs and C89 quirks. But I get what you mean. Makes me wanna test this one out even more...
Oct 14, 2026, 5:36 PMI'm willing to bet there are many industrial controllers running off of DOS systems.
I'm also willing to bet that is more secure than Linux.
Oct 15, 2026, 7:24 AM@randogoth I mean. I always thought it was the best DOS.