(2024-04-08) A few more words about DOS
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I'm back. And I still dislike DOS, its backslashes and interrupts. However, I
still consider it quite underrated nowadays, especially the flavors like 
FreeDOS and SvarDOS (which is based upon FreeDOS, in case you didn't know).

Why? Because, well... Yes, DOS looks, feels and pretty much *is* ugly. The
thing is, it's not its own fault, but rather of the underlying hardware 
architecture. Any DOS is ugly solely because x86 itself is. Period. DOS, as 
a kernel, just offers some absolutely minimal abstraction over this complete 
trainwreck. It showcases all the imperfections of x86 and clearly 
demonstrates how much more complexity is required to fully abstract away 
from them. Through this, DOS lets us fully understand where the root of all 
evil in modern computing resides, and how "more modern" began to 
automatically mean "more complex". If you still don't understand what I'm 
talking about, just look at the distribution sizes for some programs, 
interpreters and compilers backported to DOS from other OSes. If these sizes 
are bigger than for e.g. Linux, that's how much complexity Linux kernel and 
system libraries hide from you.

On a flip side though, for those who still have to stick to x86, DOS is one
of the last safe havens if you're serious about retaining control over 
things at least to some extent. Because, of course, we lost the battle long 
ago when it comes to hardware (no one can solder a modern PC the way we 
could solder a Spectrum clone anymore), but, with DOS, we still can be as 
close to that hardware as possible and not let various corporations with 
dubious intentions decide for us. As a bonus of reduced complexity, we 
automatically get reduced energy consumption (i.e. less consumed power and 
better battery life) and ability to better understand WTF is going on if 
anything doesn't work as expected. To be honest, I really have been missing 
this feeling even with Linux and OpenBSD, so I started looking at 
possibilities to daily-drive some DOS whenever I could.

This is how I found SvarDOS ([1]), a FreeDOS derivative that has an Arch-like
package system. Its main maintainer, Mateusz Viste, has developed a lot of 
other interesting DOS software. He also has a Gopherhole at gopher.viste.fr, 
and I highly recommend visiting it. Despite being a derivative, SvarDOS 
doesn't have 100% of the processes identical to FreeDOS, so reading its own 
documentation is mandatory. And the documentation format, AMB (Ancient 
Machine Book), is just wonderful, I plan on writing my own set of tools to 
work with it in a cross-platform way. The SVP package format is also simple 
enough, and the repo contains much more useful software than FreeDOS itself 
can offer. It even sparked my interest in learning the Rexx scripting 
language, as the Regina interpreter has a DOS port too. I also was really 
surprised to see the things like Lua and SQLite3 there, and, of course, the 
Links browser that has fully working graphics (with -g option) and even 
modern SSL support. Among the software not present in the SvarDOS repo, I 
can highlight a huge official Vim 7.3 port and this ([2]) SSH2DOS version 
that is pretty sufficient to turn any DOS box into a full-featured thin 
client. Of course, if you have the necessary packet drivers.

And this is pretty much the only obstacle I have: drivers. So far, I've been
testing SvarDOS in VirtualBox only, and, as you might have guessed, all 
networking is in place there. Whenever I find a suitable real PC to run it 
on (otherwise there won't be any fun), I may face the problem of not having 
even Ethernet drivers available for DOS. And WLAN, AFAIK, is pretty much a 
no-go with the current-gen chips, but I do have a spare Ethernet port on my 
home mesh node in the room. Anyway, it's worth giving it a try, maybe I'll 
find out even more about the hardware itself. And if it works, well, I'll 
make sure to put a good use to it.

The black abyss of DOS is calling to escape from the dystopia of complexity.
Are you ready for it?

--- Luxferre ---

[1]: http://svardos.org/
[2]: https://github.com/AnttiTakala/SSH2DOS