Published at LXer:

What is dead may never die, and it's all thanks to Jim Hall. Retro Tech Week The last mainstream DOS-based OS was Windows ME, which went out of support 20 years ago. And yet, thanks to free software, DOS lives on. We spoke to FreeDOS founder Jim Hall about how the project started and how it's progressing.…

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very interesting read, once time permits I have an old PII bring back to life using FreeDOS.

The most interesting part for me was where half of the people responding to a FreeDOS survey indicated that they were new users with no DOS experience.

I will be interested to see how DOS will deal with the fact that PC's don't have BIOS any more. I run FreeDOS both in qemu and on real hardware, and right now it runs a lot better on real hardware. HP used Debian and qemu to "seamlessly" boot FreeDOS on modern hardware. I can imagine some minimal Linux distribution streamlined to run FreeDOS on qemu, perhaps using Wayland for graphical output. I'd like it to have an interactive method to swap images for install media and pass through hardware resources such as USB printers and serial ports.

I've used FreeDOS on a usb stick to upgrade the BIOS on my Dell Precision T3600 (bought refurbished) a couple of times. Easy, very useful.