> DR DOS® 9.0 is a faithful clean-room reimplementation
WalterGR•59m ago
If this company now owns DR DOS, why do they need to do a clean-room reimplementation?
The About page mentions some form of ownership but doesn’t address that.
> …DRI continuing to publish updates until their sale to Novell in 1991. … DR DOS would change hands from Novell to Caldera in 1996, and again from Caldera to DeviceLogics in 2002.
> In 2022, Whitehorn Ltd. Co. acquired DR DOS and began the process of clean-room re-implementing this historically significant operating system.
The front page only mentions a “legally unencumbered” reimplementation but not how their acquisition was encumbered.
Tomte•51m ago
I think they only acquired the trademark, not the source code. But I‘m not sure.
WalterGR•50m ago
It turns out the Documentation page addresses some of this,
though not in detail. Scroll down to the FAQ section.
What this doesn't really address to me is why DR-DOS. That documentation uses a lot of flowery language to say nothing or close to nothing.
I'm too young to have used DR-DOS in anger (so I may be missing some key feature), but it seems like the entire point of DR-DOS would have been its source code legacy and accumulated feature set.
Here, my immediate question is why not FreeDOS? I'd guess it was system requirements, but according to the documentation DR-DOS 9 requires 2 MB of RAM minimum and a 386!!
jmclnx•37m ago
I was a DR-DOS 6.0 user and it was great, 7.0 seemed to be worse. But by then I had moved to Coherent then Linux when MW closed down.
Tomte•1h ago
WalterGR•59m ago
The About page mentions some form of ownership but doesn’t address that.
> …DRI continuing to publish updates until their sale to Novell in 1991. … DR DOS would change hands from Novell to Caldera in 1996, and again from Caldera to DeviceLogics in 2002.
> In 2022, Whitehorn Ltd. Co. acquired DR DOS and began the process of clean-room re-implementing this historically significant operating system.
The front page only mentions a “legally unencumbered” reimplementation but not how their acquisition was encumbered.
Tomte•51m ago
WalterGR•50m ago
https://www.dr-dos.com/documentation.html
The Wikipedia page describes some past legal troubles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS
spijdar•22m ago
I'm too young to have used DR-DOS in anger (so I may be missing some key feature), but it seems like the entire point of DR-DOS would have been its source code legacy and accumulated feature set.
Here, my immediate question is why not FreeDOS? I'd guess it was system requirements, but according to the documentation DR-DOS 9 requires 2 MB of RAM minimum and a 386!!