F6K'S DOS JOURNAL,
A JOURNEY INTO THE
DOS OPERATING SYSTEM

Aug. 20, 2026.

For several weeks now, I've been following the adventures of Anna
(known too as agk on sdf.org) in the world of DOS. She has published
several related posts on her phlog (gopher://sdf.org/1/users/agk),
participated at this year's Old Computer Challenge initiated by the
former OpenBSD devel solene@ (gopher://dataswamp.org/1/~solene), and
even launched a dedicated board (named DOS) on the SDF bboard system
to host discussions about this operating system.

Her initial idea is to provide children with second-hand machines
featuring a simple operating system and a suite of educational soft-
ware. DOS seemed like the right choice; moreover, the Internet is
teeming with applications written for DOS--including very good educa-
tional tools--most of which are now considered abandonware. What's
more, the aim is to have a system that boots from a USB drive (or in-
deed any external device), making it possible to use computers that
don't even have a hard drive--something you often come across when
looking for free or very cheap machines. And since it is DOS and her
system is designed for children and educational/fun purposes, there is
no real need for network access.

I have a four year old child myself who is starting to wonder what
daddy is always doing on his computers, and took an interest on it.
For now, he enjoys typing lines of letters into my fullscreen termi-
nal, watching Star Wars in ASCII via telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl,
having fun seeing worms eating letters in the BSD game worms(1), li-
king to see fall the rain in the BSD game rain(1), and practicing his
drawing skills in a digital black board (http://huld.re/tableau/). And
I was wondering what kind of setup I could put together for him. An-
na's arguments in favor of a small, easy access, reliable, unpreten-
tious system on a refurbished computer convinced me.

I have been following Anna's footsteps for two or three days now. I
am still at a very early stage and am far from reaching the level re-
quired to set up an ideal system for my son. For the moment, I am
mainly focusing on running tests on my own computer--a Thinkpad X280
booted from an USB drive containing Liam Proven's version of SvarDOS
(https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos), and the very system I am using
right now to write these lines, thanks to the editor 'edit' borrowed
from FreeDOS.

I ran into problems right from my initial experiments. I had to do
some research and, despite being an uber noob for everything related
to DOS, I was even able to find solutions at times. In a recent arti-
cle (gopher://sdf.org/0/users/agk/phlog/2026-08-13-atlas.txt), Anna
invites her best friend's oldest child, who is working with her to
make a bootable DOS system for their little brother, to keep a public
journal to record error messages, software testing notes, configura-
tion changes, and thoughts--in short, as she writes, to log what they
do, learn, and decide. The invitation wasn't meant for me but either
way I decided to follow the advice anyway.

So this is my own public DOS Journal, chronicling my journey into the
DOS operating system. Please, feel free to mail me at f6k@sdf.org if
you have comments, questions, or hints. And if DOS has an interest
for you and you're on SDF, join the board named DOS on bboard, you
will find interesting topics.