Hi All, Some recent posts by Don Friedman inspired this essay and idea. He said: > It would seem that the "squeeze" we all anticipated a decade > ago is starting to be felt. and > I miss the continuity of our DP efforts but I have to believe > that the handwriting is on the wall.
I agree with these sentiments, the push from Microsoft to leave 16bit behind is beginning to really squeeze. This post is an attempt to consolidate a list of some of the ways to keep DP productive a bit longer. I've been mostly silent on this list for many years... until a few days ago when discussions relating to running DP on x64 versions of Windows highlighted that I probably could not run DP (directly) on my own system. I believe I had read about this previously but because I no longer use DP on a regular basis I had not thought to check it out. I got my clients away from DP over 10 years go; the old DP application started only occasionally to retrieve very old payroll data (and getting more and more rare). But this does highlight that there may be several (many?) years after you officially finish with DP that you (or your successors) may still want to run old DP apps. Even now, when all the old payroll data is out of date even of legal requirement, I would be reluctant to have a system where I could no longer run DP (one way or another). I already use VMware for other reasons so my own situation is fairly straight forward, but I can imagine, from what I have seen on this list, that others have more sophisticated requirements than my own. There are many possibilities, below are some that I know about. I have NOT tried all the items in this list, they are simply the results of my researches (now and in the past): Free (DOS capable/compatible) operating systems (to be used directly or combined with emulators or virtualisation): . FreeDOS - http://www.freedos.org/ - Claims 100% compatibility with MS-DOS. - Open-source; source and binary distributions - Last update: v0.73 - May 2009 . DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project - http://www.drdosprojects.de/ - Not exactly open-source, see the web-site - Last update: v7.01.08 - Jul 2009 . ReactOS - http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html - Replacement for MS Windows XP (still in alpha and not feature-complete) - Open source; source and binary distributions including VMware and VirtualBox images. - I read that it does not (yet) run 16bit apps (DOS) but perhaps it can run DOSbox or other emulator to allow execution of DP - Last update: v0.3.11 Dec 2009 . Linux can run some of the DOS emulators below and also has WINE (a Windows emulator) available that may solve some situations. Emulators: . DOSbox - http://www.dosbox.com/ - A 32bit DOS emulation application - Windows, Linux, Mac and others (will run inside 64bit Windows) - Can execute (at least some) 16bit DOS apps including many of the utilities available with FreeDOS. - Open-source; source and binary distributions - Last update: v0.73 - May 2009 . DOSEMU - http://www.dosemu.org - A 32bit DOS emulation application - Linux systems only - Can execute (at least some) 16bit DOS apps - Open-source; source and binary distributions - Last update: v1.4.0.1 - May 2007 (but some activity showing in sourceforge through 2010) . Bochs - http://bochs.sourceforge.net/ - A 32bit x86 PC emulator - Windows, Linux, Mac and others (will run inside 64bit Windows) - Can execute many x86 operating systems - Open-source; source and binary distributions - Last update: v2.4.2 - Nov 2009 . JPC - http://www-jpc.physics.ox.ac.uk/ - A (32bit?) x86 PC emulator - Java (most operating systems) - Can execute many x86 operating systems - Open-source; source and binary distributions - Last update: Jul 2009 Virtualisation: . Microsoft - have several virtualisation solutions; Virtual PC, App-V, Hyper-V etc. http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/en/us/default.aspx - Latest versions run only under Windows 7 - Latest versions officially support only Windows 7, Vista and XP guest systems - Older versions can support a wider range of host and guest operating systems - if you can get them. - Commercial products with some free offerings . VMware - have several virtualisation solutions; Player, Workstation, Fusion, Server, ESXi etc. http://www.vmware.com/ - (Where applicable) can run under several operating systems including: Windows (XP thru 7), Linux and Mac (see the Fusion product). - Supports many guest operating systems including: MS-DOS, Windows (WFW, 95 thru 7), Linux, Novell, FreeBSD, Sun - Provides additional tools to install on guests to improve integration with the host, these include support for guests: Win95 and later, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Netware - Older versions can operate under (be hosted by) older versions of Windows/Linux etc. - Commercial products with some free offerings . VirtualBox - http://www.virtualbox.org/ - Can run under several operating systems including: Windows (XP thru 7), Linux, Solaris and Mac - Supports many guest operating systems including: MS-DOS, Windows (3.1, 95 thru 7), Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS/2 Warp 4.5. - Provides additional tools to install on guests to improve integration with the host, these include support for guests: WinNT and later, Linux, Solaris and OS/2, - Mixed licence options; includes an open-source/free version (that excludes certain important features like RDP and USB support) and a free for personal use (or evaluation) edition with all features. And as I noted on a previous posting there are many other virtualisation/emulation products, some of which can be found listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_platform_virtual_machines Idea: Where all this is leading is the idea that the community here could put together instructions and/or installations to assist users to migrate to some useful alternative DP configuration and so offer an even longer future. . disk images (using FreeDOS and DP etc) ready to use in one or more of the emulators listed above . installation/zip collections of tested configurations (for example; DOSbox, FreeDOS and DP). . VMware and/or VirtualBox images with appropriate installation/configuration: - FreeDOS and DP - Linux / WINE / DOSEMU|DOSbox and DP - ReactOS and DOSbox and DP (It would have been neat to include TAME in some/any of the above... maybe he would permit an evaluation version to be installed.) The first two points I suggest would best be created as network ready; waiting for the user to direct the configuration to specific network paths and printers. Only the third option is probably practical to create with it's own disk capacity for databases etc. I don't actually have the time to try all these out myself, these are just some thoughts to see what people think. If any people here had time to experiment with some of these options (or others that may be out there), then documenting the results could help other people looking to solve particular problems. -- Geoff Worboys Telesis Computing _______________________________________________ Dataperf mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
