Hi Jim,
Please find attached my interview.
Feel free to come back to me if any comments.
Regards.
El lun, 25 jul 2022 a las 20:47, Jim Hall () escribió:
> Hi everyone
>
> I wanted to share an update on the FreeDOS 28th Anniversary Ebook. You
> may remember this is the book of interviews with FreeDOS developers
> and users.
>
> I've started a GitLab project for the ebook. You can find it here:
> https://gitlab.com/freedosproject/freedos28/
>
> I've uploaded plain text copies of the interviews I've received so
> far. If you are interested in participating in the ebook, and
> ESPECIALLY IF YOU ALREADY RESPONDED TO THE INTERVIEW, please take a
> look at the project. If you responded to the interview, but you don't
> see your interview listed, THAT MEANS I DON'T HAVE A COPY OF YOUR
> INTERVIEW (I may have missed it in my Inbox, or it was caught by a
> spam filter, etc.) If your interview isn't there, LET ME KNOW so I can
> get your interview response added.
>
> If you want to contribute to the ebook, but haven't responded to the
> interview, this is your last opportunity to do so. You can find the
> list of questions in the GitLab project.
>
> I originally planned to have other technical editors help me with the
> editing process, but that didn't work out due to timing. So I will do
> the editing myself, with input from the community! I'll plan to edit
> everything in the open on GitLab.
>
> The first phase was to get everyone's raw interview responses into
> GitLab. The next phase is to organize the responses into a structure
> or format. I'll do those edits in LibreOffice, which is how I'll
> publish the ebook. Drafts will get posted as ODT and PDF files.
>
> The updated (expected) schedule is:
>
> July to early August - edit
> early to mid August - first draft
> community review opportunity
> mid to late August - second draft
> community review opportunity
> late August - final (published)
>
>
> Jim
>
>
> ___
> Freedos-devel mailing list
> Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
>
Interview questions
My name is Javier Gutiérrez Chamorro (Guti), a Spanish fan of DOS in all of its
flavors, including FreeDOS. So I am glad taking part in this 28th Anniversary
book. Thank you Jim for letting me jump in.
I am mostly know for my site https://javiergutierrezchamorro.com, started back
in 2004 and still active. The beginnings were mostly computing and software
development related, with a special mention to retro-computing. Nowadays I am
mostly focused in watch and other reviews, but vintage computing and software
is still there.
I was the man behind Scratch Upload, a project aimed to keep DOS programs in
their latest available versions in a moment where most abandonware sites
where basically focused in games. Thanks to the Internet Archive project,
the vast majority of the contents where still available:
https://archive.org/details/scratchupload
Back in the old good DOS days, and also later on when OS/2 and Windows gained
popularity, I still developed shareware and freeware programs as De Trans
Software (D.T.S.), Rainbow Software Limited (RSL) and Swap Software
Incorporated (SSI).
Non-technical:
>What is your earliest/first memory of using DOS? This is basically a
>"how did you start using DOS" question.
Even if I played a bit with an Amstrad 1512 at my father's office (running
MS-DOS 3.20), it was not until the Christmas at 1990 that I was gifted an
Amstrad PC-2086 that came with MS-DOS 3.30. It was an affordable machine
but at the same time with lots of special particularities, specially its
Paradise VGA graphics.
Then I moved to DR-DOS 3.40, and PC/DOS 5.00. After that, I got "specialized"
in niche DOSses: PC/DOS 2000, PTS-DOS 6,7 and my beloved OpenDOS featuring
the best of DR-DOS in an opened source fashion.
>How did you first get interested in FreeDOS? How did you hear about
>it? What was the first thing you did/tried on FreeDOS?
At that time I was very active in different communities, and FreeDOS
sounded aloud. I tried it, and at first glance was impressed that it
simply worked! Open source was not so popular at the time, with the
exception of Linux, so having a DOS compatible environment which was
free to use was great. I remember playing with the MICRO-C Compiler,
the tool recommended at that time for creating freeDOS software. It
was years behind the Borland's one I used, but was a good start.
>How do you run FreeDOS today? If it's a virtual machine, tell us about it
>and how you set up the VM. If it's real hardware, tell us about the setup.
I still have an old Pentium II with 32 MB. of memory running DOS, I use to
change from one distribution to another from time to time. I do not use it
regularly, but guess that it has MS-DOS 7.1 currently. My daily usage is
on VirtualBox virtual machines, if we do not take into account DOSBox, a
nice project too.
My setup is targeted more on nostalgia than
