DR-DOS is a proprietary disk operating system for [[x86]] processors.
OpenDOS is a semi-open-sourced version of DR-DOS that existed briefly while Caldera was doing Caldera shit. It is the only reason that the source code was available for improvement at all, however.
# Notability
DR-DOS is multi-tasking, natively networkable, and fast.
DR-DOS is my DOS core of choice and I made many bootable systems with it.
Paired with [[4DOS]] shell, some utilities from [[FreeDOS]] and even [[MS-DOS]] it was a joy to use.
## Comparisons
Other versions of DOS do not support multitasking at all, or only via unreliable 3rd party extensions.
Additionally, [[FreeDOS]] is incredibly slow to boot on low spec hardware.
Tiple-DOS is a multitasking system for DOS.
# The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project
A now defunct effort by programmer Udo Kuhnt to continue improving OpenDOS.
Started on the 4th of July 2002 and the final release was on July 7th, 2011. The improved USB support sadly never arrived.
Likely it never got the traction it deserved due to the terrible license that Caldera released it under.
I cannot find any information about the fate of Udo, and the Wayback machine does not have most of the site archived to see what conversations might have happened on the forum.
# References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS
- http://pmwiki.xaver.me/drdoswiki/index.php (related wiki)
- https://pmwiki.xaver.me/drdoswiki/index.php?n=Main.HistoryOfDRDOS
- https://www.dr-dos.com/dr-dos-7/ (appears to be an attempt to make a consulting business using DR-DOS, but also hosts downloads)
- https://github.com/SEPPDROID/DR-DOS-OpenDOS (an archive of a version of OpenDOS MRS 7.01)
- https://github.com/the-grue/OpenDOS (an archive of patches for OpenDOS 7.01)
- https://archiveos.org/drdos/ (archive of the last released version of the Enhancement Project 7.01.08)
- https://web.archive.org/web/20140409151731/http://drdosprojects.de/ (Wayback archive of the official Enhancement Project site)
- https://winworldpc.com/product/dr-dos/7x (archive of various releases)