If you are interested in an excellent DOS word processing program, see the information below about Envision Publisher, available from its author at a deeply discounted price.I chose FreeDOS as my OS because I am more or less familiar with DOS. I still use a number of DOS programs on my Windows machines. They tend to be small, simple and fast, which is exactly what I wanted for this particular system.
FreeDOS has matured to the point of being stable and well-equipped with components. A number of loosely associated developers are working steadily to fix whatever problems remain. I have observed significant progress in the year that I have been following FreeDOS, in the form of new releases to fix bugs as well as features and refinements to improve DOS components. FreeDOS also comes with excellent support in the form of an archived bulletin board at the FreeDOS.org web site.
New Hardware Upgrade
The achilles heel of any old machine is it's thrashing hard drive, destined to fail eventually because of mechanical wear. This ugly fact is fundamentally incompatible with my goal, which is a fast, spartan machine that will not fail me under any circumstances. I spent about $100 to acquire a 128mb IDE flash drive, which is now the only hard drive in my DOS machine. These drives are used for industrial applications. I bought mine from Pretec Electronics Corp. in Fremont, CA. I wanted to use different shipping/billing addresses. They didn't like that plan, and getting it straightened out took a couple of phone calls and emails. This left me with a good impression overall, because they were meticulous and clear in their communication so as to get it right. The product is industrial-grade, with quality finish details and a rugged case. It installed easily with no documentation provided or required.
This drive is every bit as fast as I hoped it would be. It's almost as fast as a RAM drive, providing a quantum improvement in overall system performance.
Careful editing of my DOS software collection enabled me to set up the drive with all the stuff I use regularly, and leave 80+ mb available for data. Since I can easily move data on and off the tiny flash drive, this is plenty.
Byte for byte, this is an expensive way to go, but it appears to be a viable retrofit for any IDE board.
Software Choices
Click here for a short list of links to sites where I have found useful software for my DOS machine.
The picture below shows my screen after a fresh boot, dressed up with a custom screen font and 1dir.exe, which used to be shareware but is now free. 1dir has lots of colorful and useful options that can be set up in batch files or shortcuts. It is the main tool I use to keep track of everything on my drive.
Below is a simple Fly desktop with icons for some of my favorite DOS programs. I didn't bother with any text because a descriptive message appears in the lower left-hand corner when the cursor passes over a given icon.
I am now using Arachne 1.85. It seems to be quite stable, and every new version supports more types of web content. I can now view and send Yahoo mail, for example.
Note: Arachne should be run on a RAM drive if possible. This browser supports obsolete hardware, and the way it does so is by caching lots of files. I run it from an 8 mb RAM drive and performance is comparable to a Windows browser.
Arachne has a graphical file manager with built-in viewer associations for a number of file types, which makes it a useful desktop tool.
It bothered me to see this excellent software relegated to the SimTel legacy bin as a 30-day trial version only, so I sought out the author/publisher and was fortunate enough to make contact with him. His name is Julian Achim, and he can be reached at julianachim@yahoo.com. He will be happy to sell new copies of Envision Plus for $25 and Envision Pro, shown below, for $35, a big discount from the original price and even the discounted price of $50 that I paid some years back. Envision delivers crisp text and graphic output on my HP 697c, a DOS-capable printer. As I discuss below, however, some of the newer printers require a Windows control program and won't print from DOS at all.
Graffiti Artist launches with not one but two hanging splash screens that require user input to clear. DOS programs are full of such rough edges, but DOS utilities can polish them up. I launch Graffiti Artist with a batch file that loads Stuffit.exe into memory with instructions to put an ESC key (ASCII 27) into the keyboard buffer after one second, and a second ESC key after 2 seconds. The batch lines are as follows:
cd\gfxtools\graffiti
stuffit +1 27 +2 27
graffiti
stuffit /r
I load Screen Thief, formerly shareware but now free, as a TSR so I can capture anything on my screen, including the pictures on this page.
I use many small, ingenious utilities. One of my favorites is calc387.com, a 1024 byte command-line calculator. I have set up batch files to perform various calculations, like celcius/fahrenheit conversions or the area of a circle, with a few keystrokes. Another utility that has helped me out is tcap.com, which captures screen output - including fly-by error messages - in a text file.
I can waste a lot of time with oddball programs, like ddraw.com (314 bytes), which I used to draw the bird at the bottom of this page, and acidwarp, an early-90s DOS screensaver from which I obtained the screen capture shown at the top.
And of course it's fun to have a real DOS platform to revisit the old games I haven't played for 10 years or more - along with the ones I never got around to trying, which are now languishing as abandonware on various sites.
All the software on my tiny flash drive adds up to about 40mb. That is consistent with my goal of keeping this system simple and functional.
Printers
Some printers, including my HP 712c, only work on Windows machines, because the Windows drivers include control programs that ordinarily reside on a chip inside the printer. I wasted a lot of time trying to troubleshoot my parallel port configuration because I didn't know this.
Once I was clued in, I went to the junk store and picked up an HP 697c for $15. I felt lucky to find a color Deskjet that my research had shown to be DOS-capable. But the power cube was missing and the voltage requirement was different from all my other peripherals - 30 volts. So I wired three adjustable wall cubes in series, along with a jack fashioned out of bits of plastic and an automotive wiring connector. It worked fine for awhile, but a puff of smoke put an end to that setup. I went back to the junk store and scoured the inventory of power cubes, and lo and behold, there was the one I needed, adding $5 to my total cost. Naturally, I had to buy new cartridges as well. They cost about four times what I paid for the printer, meaning that this used, worn-out printer ended up costing about as much as a cheap new one.
The practical value of a DOS system
I have seen quite a few comments to the effect that there are old machines lying around needing a free OS to bring them roaring back to life for those who can't afford computers. In parts of the world, that might make sense, but in the U.S., anyone who can't afford a computer probably has no place to plug one in, either.
The reality is, the DOS desktop market is mostly limited to enthusiasts, and that is not likely to change. In this day and age, DOS is economically most valuable as an OS for computerized devices, including old PCs used to control machine tools or other equipment, which is a subject I am just beginning to learn about.
My thinking has evolved as I have worked with this system. It's a useful machine, without doubt, but this is mainly because I have linked it to my Windows 98 computer. I established this connection with a KVM switch, a parallel port null modem cable, and MS-DOS Interlnk/Intersvr. I run Intersvr on the DOS machine and load Interlnk in the config.sys file on the Windows machine. This way I can access the drive on the DOS machine from Windows Explorer or a DOS window. The parallel cable is slow, but DOS files are so small it doesn't matter.
Among other things, this setup makes it easy to use programs that want real DOS on a real DOS platform - i.e., a machine with an ISA sound card and/or a memory setup not available in a DOS window, or at least not without rebooting. Given the dirt-cheap price of old computers at junk stores, or people who will gladly give them away to get them out of the closet, this seems like a practical add-on for lots of Win 98 users. The most expensive item is the KVM switch. Radio Shack still carries parallel and serial port null modem cables.
DOS comes with significant and well-known limitations. I have no plans to abandon Windows, but I value DOS as a more efficient platform for many activities. I also value its ability to run blazingly fast on obsolete desktop machines that can be picked up for a few dollars.
I have outlined some system specs here.
Here is a page about a bootable floppy disk I prepared.
