Hello World!
I found out that now Lunduke started a DOS week challenge. I was wondering if anyone is onboard and would like to share? I’ll be trying to setup and run MS DOS 6.22 for the coming week and I will be in pain. Because I never used software that old nor am I familiar with it. Wish me luck.
Below is the link for the section him discussing it; I am awaiting you others to get onboard see how far we can go! Good luck everyone.
My endvour is starting, I’d say bitter? Boxes is not accepting my 6.22 img files but, I found a video on someone who managed to get IRC to work so I’ll be on there, I have my classic channel I’m always on:
webchat.quakenet.org
channel Frag
Currently following a HowTo on Legroom to setup my 6.22, found the iso on archive.org going to set it up then copy on to my USB drive so i can boot of it, although UEFI might not really be a “supported” BIOS, I can hopefully have a bootable DOS.
Ran dos as a kid.
It’s fine if you don’t want to multitask or use the internet.
But IRC is running on the internet?
I used DESQview back in the days. Quarterdek is probably pretty dead these days so they probably don’t mind if you use a serial you find on the net 
There are tcp/ip stacks for dos out there, don’t know how good they are.
Does the challenge allow telnetting into a Linux shell? Then it should be pretty easy.
Oh, I also read about a proxy a while ago that translates html 4 to html 1 (kind of), that should help with surfing the web with lynx/links/elinks.
I wish you luck. I have no idea what I would use MS DOS for…
Oh I know there’s ip stacks available. I was setting isp customers up for windows 3.1 internet (win3.1 ran on top of dos). Ugh
I think telnetting into Unix is alllowed, because Telnet is a feature.
I mean you could probably even go as far as run W98 and use the HTML trick to enjoy life.
I write quite a lot, so I just need a text editor able to save in .md, .html, .txt and maybe even rich text.
I watch my videos on my phone anyways.
Now If I could setup a BBS for L1 forums… so I could access it from basically anything…
That proxy would be FrogFind I think. Translates any page you search for into text with optional images. Works quite well for vintage machines/terminal-mode browsing.
Well, I will need to check that out. I’m also adding L1BBS on my bucket list. Just has to be done. Currently still reading on how to configure and setup the DOS for my system. I might actually need to go buy an old laptop. I thought of running it off my USB stick but that might be just a dream. My laptop has no floppy drive.
If I still had a multi-tasking desktop environment application that was 2x better than DOS Shell that would make a week of DOS challenge easier, it was the closest way to run DOS apps while still having some Windows/TandyOS like functions.
Don’t have any hardware that handles DOS properly, I’d need to find 2x1GB sticks of DDR4 as DOS 6.2 spits out weird errors when you have more than 2GB of RAM.
Let’s see… The "Live in DOS for a Week" Challenge! - by Bryan Lunduke
Easiest alternative is probably to run FreeDos, pretty sure it doesn’t have any problem with large amount of memory and you can make a live usb drive.
Here’s a site from when dinosaurs roamed the earth
Get hold of 4dos, that will make your life easier.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Borland Turbo pascal, C++, or C, mighty popular ides back in the day. The help files were really good with examples, I learned a lot from them.
And you got to have Norton commander.
Is Freedos binary compatible with the original stuff?
To cover all bases I say mostly I’ve seen quite a few bios or firmware updates that use FreeDos on a stick or a cd. But if the software does funny things with the memory it might get shaky.
I run an old dos inventory program via dosemu on my linux machines all the time.
Use freesDos. 
Turbo pascal was great. It would still be an awesome learning environment today as well. Good ide, great help files, fast compiles, friendly syntax and inline assembler.
Dos is also a great to hack on with assembler. Want to access video memory? Load 0xa000 into DS register and poke away with your index registers with in line assembly move commands.
I wrote a couple of crappy vga dos games when I was about 17 using turbo pascal, in-line assembly and some vga/assembler documents downloaded from a BBS.
You can get a pixel on screen in 320x200 256 colour vga in like 10 lines of code, including initialisation.
Obviously all your other drawing primitives can be derived from that as you learn how to write them. And refined as you learn how to make them faster.
Getting any sort of immediate result in any language these days in any modern OS is way too much boiler plate.
From Mark Rendle’s The worst programming language ever, Oslo 2021. Great talk poking fun at different programming languages and their oddities
