Although rumors about the project’s death spread rapidly, its creator, Jim Hall, claims that they were just a joke and he isn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet.

Recent rumors on the internet that the FreeDOS project is dead were infirmed by the same person that launched them. Jim Hall, the creator of the open source FreeDOS project, made a joke (as he claims) on the project’s old website announcing that the “FreeDOS is dead”, exactly on the project’s 12th anniversary. Hall soon began receiving concerned email messages from people wondering why he had killed the project, so he immediately replaced the old page, but word continued to spread that “FreeDOS was dead.”

Hall admitted he was feeling discouraged by the lack of recent progress on the project, but he felt encouraged by the renewed interest from developers and the reaction from the FreeDOS community. “Right now, I want to get a ‘1.0′ out there by the end of July”, he says.

FreeDOS aims to be a complete, free, 100% MS-DOS compatible operating system. The project, previously known as “Free-DOS” and originally as “PD-DOS.”, was originally conceived in 1994 when Microsoft announced its upcoming release of Windows 95 along with plans to stop supporting MS-DOS. The future 1.0 version will include features like multitasking and flat memory.

In the meantime, “The future is still bright for FreeDOS”, says Hall.