Free Software For DOS

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I will not be updating the FSFD site nor monitoring the forums for a while- I am moving from Idaho to North Carolina USA during the next month.

Geocities bit the dust on October 26, 2009.

On July 6, 2009, CompuServe OurWorld was shut down permanently.

No nostalgia here.

FSFD was mirrored for a very long time on Geocities. But it was never an adequate solution. Reimagery.com is striving to host all binaries – I only need more motivation to keep updating the broken links : )

I have noticed that many external links on FSFD are now dead. Steve (“Short Stop”) updated the site regularly until 2006- and then the site was dormant until 2009 when I picked up maintenance again.

The chore of “re-animating” dead links is a significant one- many DOS sites have gone dark over the past 5 years. I am investing significant time locating binaries and correcting broken URLs. Many URLs are permanently dead- the software authors no longer have a presence on the Web.

The FSFD forum now has a board for those who need to find hard-to-locate DOS programs. I hope we can all work together to get these lost treasures back into distribution.

I am currently attempting to host all files on FSFD- at some point I will offer a torrent or access to a directory where others can download/mirror the entire collection.

I have stored copies of Brian Friesen’s DOS and Win32 console programs on FSFD.

Here’s the link:

http://reimagery.com/fsfd/bin/friesen/

I still need to update the broken links on the FSFD site.

2009-10-03: Update: Brian’s site is back online

Just a quick note.

Charles Dye produced some of the leanest and meanest DOS programs around- and they were always free. LOCATE has to be one of the finest DOS file finders ever produced. I used it extensively for many years- even as a Windows user. All of Charles’ programs included excellent documentation.  Genuine freeware treats and the product of true programming genius. Charles also contributed greatly to the help files for 4DOS.

Charles’ web site has gone down recently, and many of the latest versions of his programs were never uploaded to the major DOS ftp sites.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) I have been able to rescue many of Charles’ files- and have uploaded them to my server at reimagery.com.

Here is the link to his files….Charles Dye Programs

I will update the FSFD links soon so that they point to Reimagery.

I still have a copy of one of the earlier versions of the FSFD web site. Many of the external links are broken…but frankly it looks more contemporary than the current site!

Free Software For DOS circa 1997

FSFD JULY 1997

If you have an interesting article or observation on DOS- I am currently accepting guest submissions to the blog.

Leave a comment to this post and I will get back to you…

A few words about an unsung open-source editor that excels across platforms (except DOS, of course). Komodo-Edit. While not too speedy (runs on mozilla code), its feature set is impressive and well-executed.

Why do I particularly like it?
It intelligently selects/edits code and does a bang-up job of finding/replacing text in multiple files.

Replace text in multiple files

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I have started a forum for the FSFD website here

http://reimagery.com/dos-forum/

Discuss any DOS related topics- and suggest programs or revisions relevant to the Free Software for DOS site.

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In a strange “gotcha” moment this aged Linux user has now found himself thirsting for DOS again- I had to batch convert several old ARC archives into ZIP archives. I recalled that the FSFD site listed some batch conversion utils that perform this very task…Doh! Need to install DOSBOX or a vitual copy of FreeDOS on my Linux box.

Tonight I’m downloading an old (and likely rare) mirror of a DOS archive dating from 2001. Just over 2 GB total…How times have changed. This will be a good source of files to store locally.

Long ago (well, 15+ years) I downloaded many PCMAG utils from Simtel and Garbo when those programs were freely distributable. I do not store or directly link to those files on my sever. Why?

A few years ago, prominent and respectable ftp sites were threatened for publicly serving those files after previously been given permission to do so. Was the reversal legal? Apparently. Desperate capitalism at its worst (and I’m a die-hard capitalist).

You can discuss these issues with my generous friends at ftp://sunset.se/pub/simtelnet/msdos and http://www.umich.edu/~archive/msdos/util/

Strangely, I was able to freely download an old PCMAG util from PCMAG. But it was not easily located (I googled the archive name). I need to research this some more…