4DOS

[John G. Heim]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gaijin" <gaijin at clearwire.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
>
> Think it would be nice to collect all this old stuff and put it
> on a CD or DVD iso image.  I wonder what some of these defunct companies
> would say if we asked them to release the old, no longer supported
> source code to the GPL.  I miss the old WordStar Professional word
> processor.
>

By and large they'd say no.  I've seen it tried many times and mostly you 
get no answer or a refusal. I think these people still have lawyers telling 
them it's a bad idea. Maybe they have something to hide within their code --  
like that it wasn't entirely their own in the first place.

Anyway, I don't know anything about 4dos but the FreeDOS project is alive 
and well. Their mailing list is very active (google it). Anyone interested 
in DOS applications should definately check out FreeDOS. For instance, I 
know that Jaws for DOS; which is a free download on the Freedom Scientific 
web site; runs under FreeDOS.

I have a diskette image on my web site that allows you to boot freeDOS with 
jaws for DOS. It's configured to start talking with an external doubletalk 
hardware synth. In other words, if you have a doubletalk, you can boot from 
this diskette and get speech. See:

http://www.math.wisc.edu/~jheim/blindi/FreeDOS-ltlk.img

The diskette image also includes CD-ROM support. So, theoretically, you can 
boot from a diskette made with this image and then access a CD-ROM. I was 
hoping to install Windows this way. But the Windows installer craps out when 
run under FreeDOS. However, you should be able to make a bootable CD-ROM 
with this image.