Using Freedos in 2022 
======================

I recently spoke with an older coworker of me (he is a bit over 70, semi-
retired and an electronics - genius), who asked me if i could come over
to his house some day and help him with a few problems regarding his new
PC.

So, this weekend i grabbed my bicycle and rode over to him. He has now an
semi-modern Fujitsu Thinkcentre and had already copied over all files from
his old computer and installed every software he needs. The only problem he
has is to get online. So, no problem you would probably think. The catch:
He uses FreeDOS as his primary operating system and since the days of 
MS-DOS 6.22 never made the transition to Windows or Linux. So... this was
going to be an interesting afternoon.

To give you a perspective what software he uses daily (as far as i can
remember):

WordPerfect as text processor
As-Easy-As as spreasheet calculator
Arachne as webbrowser, email- and ftp software

Followed by a large collection of Shareware and PD Software for various
tasks.

But returning to the problem how to get him online: His main problem was 
that he had no DOS compatible driver for integrated network card on his
mainboard. I started to dig in the various (surprisingly plenty!) DOS 
related forums and stumbled upon a nice tool named NICSCAN.EXE by 
Georg Potthast [1] which should be able to identify the build in 
network adapter. Which it did. The network card turned out to be Broadcom
Netlink 57XX compatible so we just needed to download the packet driver
from Mr. Potthast's site, copy it over to his computer and put it into
his fdauto.bat (think of it as an init script). After this we only needed
to edit his wattcp.cfg (the network config of FreeDOS) and he was ready
to go again (things like configuring his email and so on was no problem
for him).

So... why did he stay with DOS i asked him. He answered that he liked the
simplicity of the OS, that it is - at least in his opinion - more "human
sized" than bigger OSes like Linux or - god beware! - Windows. And, after
taking a longer look at FreeDOS i kinda like it. It has clearly evolved 
from its humble origins, and comes now with USB support, an apt like
paket manager, Fat32 support and kinda everything you would otherwise
seek in a modern console based os. I think i will give it a try someday
in the future...

[1]  http://www.georgpotthast.de/sioux/packet.htm