Younger PC users may have never encountered DOS. Even those of us who had a taste of it may only have used it as the Command Prompt or PowerShell 'app' in Windows. But even though Microsoft stopped updating MS-DOS in the year 2000 (as part of Windows Me), there remains a small group of passionate developers building and maintaining an open-source version of this operating system, called FreeDOS.
FreeDOS dates back to 1994, when its developer, Jim Hall announced it as PD-DOS. With Microsoft switching to the Windows operating system that focused on a graphical user interface, Hall wanted to keep this seminal command-line interface-based OS alive, so he built a public domain version (PD) of the text-based operating system. He would rename PD-DOS to FreeDOS soon thereafter, and it still receives updates up until today.
