Today is the 29th anniversary of FreeDOS, and I wanted to show how anyone can get started in programming on FreeDOS.

In 1994, several of us got together around a pretty neat idea.

We liked DOS, but Microsoft was clearly moving completely to Windows. "The next version of Windows," they said, "would do away with DOS."

We wanted to keep DOS around, so we decided to write our own. That project, announced 29 years ago TODAY on June 29 1994, was the FreeDOS Project.

And I wanted to show that it's not that hard to rewrite many the core DOS utilities. You don't have to be an expert programmer to write some of the basic tools. And that's what I'm going to show you a simple way that anyone can write some programs that replace the standard DOS commands.

I should mention that these aren't the best algorithms. In fact, there are better ways to read from a file. But I want to show how any beginner programmer can jump in and get started. And after all, I was definitely a "beginner" programmer in 1994 when I started working on FreeDOS. You can find these same basic methods in my early code from 1994.

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