After 12 years of development and rumors that the project was dead, the open source MS-DOS operating system project FreeDOS has finally reached its 1.0 version.

The development of FreeDOS started in 1994 when Microsoft announced its upcoming release of Windows 95 long with plans to stop supporting MS-DOS. At that time, Jim Hall decided to create a project that would create a public domain version of DOS and he became the creator of FreeDOS.

The work on the project continued until July 2006 when Hall made a joke and announced on the project’s Web site that FreeDOS project was dead. Although Hall’s joke was taken seriously public attention was drawn to the project and encouraged the development team to work on the 1.0 release.

After officially disclosing the joke, Hall said: “We’ve been extremely busy since the events in late July. It’s interesting that response (both from FreeDOS developers and the outside community) was very supportive and wanted to help make FreeDOS reach our 1.0 goal.”

Two months after that event, FreeDOS 1.0 is ready and available for free download. If you think of any reason why you should download FreeDOS, the project’s Web site offers the three main uses of it:

1. To run old DOS games (like DOOM, etc.)
2. To run old business software that only supports DOS
3. To support an embedded DOS system, such as a computerized cash register or till

“Honestly, I think most of the people out there will probably download FreeDOS to play old DOS games inside a PC emulator. Personally, I love DOOM and Dark Forces. Those were great games! But don’t discount the embedded systems market. There are lots of embedded systems designers that still use DOS, and are very happy to see FreeDOS reach 1.0 status because it legitimizes their use of FreeDOS in the embedded systems they sell,” Hall Says.

FreeDOS 1.0 comes with a HTML-based help system and networing support and plans are to add more GNU utilities and even a graphical user interface. The ISO image can be found here.