DR-DOS rises again – rebuilt from scratch, not open source

DR-DOS is back, and there is already a test version you can download. But as of yet, it's not finished, not FOSS – and not based on the original code.

The long-dormant DR-DOS.com website is alive again, and DR-DOS 9.0 is in development. There have been six preliminary releases so far this year. The current work-in-progress version is version 9.0.291.

This is not the same OS as the DOS-compatible OS that Digital Research developed back in the 1980s, working on the basis of its multitasking multiuser Concurrent DOS OS. The first version of that was dubbed DR DOS 3.31, but for very early vintage PC enthusiasts, we recommend DR DOS 3.41 from 1981. As the version number hints, this is just a little more advanced than the classic MS-DOS 3.3, which was the first release that supported more than two partitions on each ...