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By 21st century standards, DOS is so tiny and simple that it can run on almost anything. It has a library of thousands of apps, including some very powerful tools. Many were shareware or public domain, and are legal to use for free. Even many formerly commercial apps are legally freeware now. As an example, there's a good assortment at the FreeDOS repo. FOSS was not a big thing in the DOS era – it predates the invention of the GPL, for instance – but DOS versions of some of the big-name FOSS apps, such as Emacs and Vim, do exist. //
There's one purpose where being the digital equivalent of a hermit in a cave in the desert is an advantage. A function for which a total lack of ability to connect to a WLAN and access the Web is a desirable thing: a standalone, non-networked, multimedia-free writing machine.
Early versions of many of the big-name word processors ran on DOS, including the classic WordPerfect and the original Microsoft Word. There are other writers' tools, too, such as Symantec's GrandView outliner. Not all are free to use these days, but a surprising number are. For instance, one of the most popular British apps from the 1980s boom times, Arnor Protext, is now freeware. Even some of the big names, when the last inheritor ceased trading years ago, as we described regarding MicroPro's WordStar last year. //
Microsoft Word 5.5 came out in 1990 and was the first DOS release with a modern CUA user interface – in other words, drop-down menus using standard keystrokes. It still works well and Microsoft released this version as freeware in 1999 as a Year 2000 fix for all previous versions of Word for DOS and OS/2. (Unfortunately, this doesn't apply to Word 6.0 for DOS, which was the final DOS version and is a little more pleasant to use.) //
The result of the holiday season at the end of last year is our USB-DOS project on GitHub. It's a – so far, very small – collection of images of bootable USB keys. There are both FAT16 and FAT32 images. The FAT16 image will fit on a 256 MB key, if you can still find one that tiny; the FAT32 image will fit on a 4 GB key with a lot of room to spare. The first release, version 1.0, contains MS Word, Arnor Protext, an outliner, and the WordPerfect Editor. It boots straight into a graphical menu that lets you run the apps without ever even seeing DOS's command line. The second release, version 1.1, is nearly twice the size, but that's because it adds in the DOS components from Robert Sawyer's WordStar 7 archive, including file conversion utilities, and substantial documentation as PDF files. For that reason, we also added Adobe Reader for DOS.
