The fun part about freedos is that it feels like a very modern dos environment. A lot of what you would call quality of life features compared to the last MS dos.<p>I have always wondered why you could not have a 64-bit native dos, The answer I have come up with is that it would not be dos because it would not be compatible with dos programs. the second perhaps more important reason is that, sure dos is an operating system. but it leans really hard on the pc firmware, the bios. if you squint right, the bios could be considered the actual OS and dos just a shell on it. And the bios has a lot of legacy cruft and limitations, modern pc operating systems ditch the bios as fast as possible and lean on direct access. But in that light the modern 64-bit native dos might be the uefi shell.<p>Conclusion. As a big unix snob, I don't really like dos all that much and it have little nostalgia for it. I suspect HP could(and do it appears) get away with a minimal console only linux install for their firmware flashing needs. but the long tail of low level dos tooling for the PC world is still hanging on.
Discussed at the time (of the article):<p><i>The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31389893">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31389893</a> - May 2022 (149 comments)
Does anyone know what "Windows 11 Home 64 Plus" and "Windows 11 Home 64 Advanced" are (from the screenshot of the OS options HP offered for that laptop)? Most I could find out is that they appear to be OEM versions.
As the article points out, of course, just a "boot something" placeholder until you wipe it and install the OS of choice.<p>However. Suppose someone took this seriously and plugged in, say, a USB floppy drive (they exist[ed], I have one) in order to run themselves some genuinely old Wordstar or or Lotus 123 or Turbo Pascal from ancient disks they still have. Does the rabbit hole go that deep, i.e. the appropriate QEMU device mappings are in place? What about running a DOS based TCP/IP thing... would it see the ethernet port, or if absent, a USB ethernet dongle?
It's for people who, for whatever reason, don't want to pay for the OS. They need to put something on there, so they went with something very simple and free where there's no chance of having to support it.