Re: DOS as a modern OS

On Mon, 28 Oct 2002, Natasha Portillo wrote:

> Is there any possibility to making FreeDOS a DOS based operating system
> with a more modern and portable structure?

it cannot be 100% DOS compatible and modern and portable. This is an 
inherent limitation of the documented and particularly, the 
"undocumented" DOS API.

> I refer, making it not so hardware dependent, with an abstraction layer,
> with as less asm as possible.

Can you elaborate? As far as I can see we already have that.

> more similar to the Windows NT and BSD UNIX kernels...

DOS is DOS by design, based around the segmented 20-bits memory model of 
the 8088 cpu. It is complementary to, and not competing with WinNT, 
Linux, *BSD, etc.

Of course, some parts of FreeDOS can be ported, and have been ported to 
other CPUs in the recent and not-so-recent past. Mostly for embedded 
purposes though.

Bart