The original DOS is very old, dating from the early 1980s.. DOS was updated many times over the decades, with MS-DOS 5.0 (1991) being very different from earlier versions.

Early Versions of Windows had Problems

By the mid-1990s, DOS was on its way out. Windows had arrived, and people knew that a graphical operating system was the future. Early versions of Windows ran on DOS, but people knew that would not remain true for long. When a program in windows crashed, the whole windows system would freeze.

Many people disliked Windows 3.1, which had bugs and would crash easily, and they didn't want DOS to go away. The FreeDOS project began with programmers worried about DOS being replaced by a buggy and problematic version of windows. They considered switching to Linux, but Linux at the time had very few applications.

FreeDOS Began in 1994

After a discussion on the Usenet message boards about making a public domain version of DOS, the FreeDOS project began. Many people who had worked on making addons for DOS that made the command line more powerful joined the FreeDOS project.

In 1994-1995, they released four versions for FreeDOS, Alpha 1 to Alpha 4. FreeDOS is still relevant in 2021 because it is one of the best ways to get old software to run on a modern system. While Windows computers in the 1990s came with DOS, modern machines will run into problems if you install the old DOS program.

The alpha versions of FreeDOS were followed by Beta versions of the software in the second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s. It took until 2006 for FreeDOS 1.0 to be released. The software continued to be improved upon after the 1.0 version.

In 2004, HP sold some new computers that came with FreeDos. Dell and Packard Bell sold computers that came with FreeDos in 2007 and 2008.

FreeDOS is a modern DOS

FreeDOS works perfectly well on modern computers. You can use it to run old applications and games on a modern computer. The command-line interface is also much more powerful it was for the original DOS.

FreeDOS also works on old systems. If you install FreeDOS on an old 286 or 386, it will work. It does a remarkably good job of being compatible with computers built decades apart.

FreeDos Development Continues

Since FreeDos is an open-source project that anyone can legally make their own version of, people continue to add to it. You can get versions of FreeDos that can do things that you could never do with the original DOS. For example, you can do JavaScript Development in FreeDOS.