OpenGEM > Interviews > Jim Hall
One day, way back when, a guy said "let's make a free version of DOS." He did, and now the FreeDOS project is the most important distribution of DOS available. The guy's name is Jim Hall, and he kindly agreed to talk with us.
Who are you, and what do you do?
Hi! I'm Jim Hall, and I'm the founder/coordinator of the FreeDOS Project. Originally, that involved writing more code than I do now. Today, I pretty much do the web site and other things that help build up and support the community.
When did you get involved with FreeDOS?
I started the FreeDOS Project when I was attending the University of Wisconsin-River Falls (USA). My major was physics, but I had quite a diverse background with computers and operating systems, although I had never before taken on a project the size that FreeDOS has become.
It occurred to me that MS-DOS just wasn't very well designed. There were things you just couldn't do under DOS that you could do with, say, a UNIX system. I guess my biggest complaint was that there weren't very many utilities shipped with MS-DOS, and there weren't very many command line options to the utilities that were already part of MS-DOS.
With the little bit of experience that I had (at the time) with the C programming language, I began re-writing some of the basic DOS utilities such as MORE, TYPE, and ECHO. The utilities I was writing were backwards-compatible with MS-DOS (that is, they supported all the functionality of the MS-DOS utilities) but contained extensions that made the programs more useful to me.
It was about this time that I started noticing some articles on USENET News that said, "is there a free DOS that I can download for my PC?" You have to remember, this was about the time that Linux (a free UNIX) was becoming popular with students. DOS was the next step, I suppose.
There was no free DOS available at the time. I released my utilities under the GNU GPL (a free software license, which you can find on www.gnu.org), found other free utilities that could replace MS-DOS programs, and began to gather support for a free DOS.
Around July, 1994, I announced that I had started a free DOS project, called "PD-DOS." By October, I realized that most of the stuff I had collected was not actually "public domain" but was GNU GPL or otherwise "freeware". So by October, 1994, I changed the name to Free-DOS (the hyphen was later dropped, to become "FreeDOS").
When did you hear about OpenGEM?
I've been using GEM in different forms for many years. My first exposure was at university, and a friend had an Atari ST computer. The GUI was called the "TOS" and was a special version of GEM. I thought it looked interesting, and I heard that DR-DOS had a similar GUI, so I tried that. DR-DOS ViewMax was also a special version of GEM.
So when I learned years later on a FreeDOS mailing list that OpenGEM was a continuation of GEM, I was very excited. I immediately downloaded it and ran it on FreeDOS.
What's your involvement with OpenGEM?
Really, I'm just a user of OpenGEM. To be honest, I don't normally use any kind of GUI under DOS; I prefer to use the command line. However, GEM will always have a special place for me, so I still use OpenGEM.
What do you like about OpenGEM?
I like the simplicity. The GUI is just simple to use.
What's your biggest gripe with OpenGEM?
The icons. I know that OpenGEM was not intended to have eye candy, but since the redesign to start including 3D elements in the GUI, the flat-looking desktop icons are starting to look, well, flat. Since OpenGEM is distributed under the GNU GPL, it would be nice to borrow some icons from other GNU GPL'd GUI projects, such as GNOME. I'm not saying it has to be in the full color pallette of GNOME, but I think OpenGEM could certainly borrow their folder, floppy, and hard drive icons, I think.
What type of applications does OpenGEM have?
I see OpenGEM being used by people who may not be comfortable with DOS, but need to use a computer. For example, DOS could make a good Internet appliance (email, web browser, etc.) But you don't need to frighten away new users by presenting them with a DOS command line. Instead, let OpenGEM be the GUI that lets them launch their email and web browser.
