PM-DOS

Home page: http://www.opensourcedepot.com/PM-DOS.html
Download: ftp://opensourcedepot.com/PM-DOS
Author: Pat Villani (http://www.monmouth.com/user_pages/patv)

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

15 November 2001: On September 11th, while the world was watching events unfold, I started a series of tests that would lead to a diagnosis of colon cancer.  I had surgery to remove the tumor, and pathology reports showed that I had some lymph node involvement.  I am now receiving chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

Unfortunately, this leaves me weak and limits my abilities to work on projects.  I've decided to put this project on hiatus in order to complete the Linux for Windows project.  I will then restart this project.  I make no guarantees, but I expect resume activity on PM-DOS in late 2002.
 

Introduction

What's this all about?  I've gotten a lot of email regarding my participation in FreeDOS, my book FreeDOS Kernel, and the original FreeDOS code, DOS-C.  It seems that a lot of folks would like to see a protected mode version of DOS, but I'm not sure how useful it would be.  Help me decide whether or not to do it and what to do.  Join my mailing list and contribute ideas.  I'll document progress here as we go along.

Some Basics

So, what are we talking about?  Seems that most folks want DOS to grow up.  They want DOS to be multitasking/multiprogramming.  Very, very few folks have asked for it to be multi-user, so this is probably not a project goal.  It should have a vm86 mode that caters to legacy DOS programs.  The API should be similar to the real mode version, but should take advantage of PM features.  In connection with multiprogramming, it needs IPC mechanisms such as pipes, semaphores, etc.  The API should be clean and simple, which is what everyone seemed to like most about the original real mode DOS.

So, what else do we need?  I don't know, but hopefully we'll find out soon.  Subscribe to the mailing list for updates and discussions.

Mailing List

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