On Mon, Jul 24, 2023 at 3:46 PM Daniel Essin via Freedos-user <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello, > > I'm following this list and find it very interesting. I found it when I > was trying to prepare myself to help a friend whose business in built > around a DOS app. It's clear that many/most/all? have access to other > computers and OSes. This would be obvious if only because one needs > access to the internet even if only to get this list. This has made me > curious. > > What are others using freedos for: business, curiosity, running retro > games and apps for fun, to avoid total dependence on the evil empire, or > something else? >
Hi Dan We ran a survey several years ago, and then last year, to answer exactly that question: How are people using FreeDOS? Several years ago (around 2014?) we found people were running FreeDOS for 3 or 4 main use cases: 1. To play classic DOS games 2. To run legacy DOS applications 3. To support/develop embedded systems and sometimes 4. To install firmware updates on certain motherboards I recall that the legacy DOS software was often in a business setting, such as organizations that needed to retrieve information from an old DOS application. You discover that some data is locked up in some data files that are only accessible by the program that wrote the data. So you find the software (or download it if you don't have it), then install FreeDOS + the application, and "save as" the data to some format that you can use. We did this when I served as CIO for a university. One of the faculty found some old floppies with old research data. They wanted to get the data back (I think to write a paper that referenced the historical data). We installed FreeDOS on a spare PC that had a floppy drive, found the original program on a DOS apps archive site, installed that, and loaded the data. That program could also dump the data into a plain text file (similar to CSV) which the faculty researcher could load into a spreadsheet to do further analysis. More recently, we found that people were running FreeDOS for (mostly) 3 main uses: 1. To play classic DOS games 2. To run legacy DOS applications 3. To develop new DOS programs For #3, I think that mostly represented FreeDOS developers responding to the survey. The survey had a few outliers (we still see people who use FreeDOS to install firmware updates, for example) but in 2022, those were pretty low compared to the other 3 uses. Jim _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
