I have used ChatGPT since December; I was (and still am) impressed at what it can generate. I think you need to be careful about what questions you ask it, and how you ask those questions. If you ask ChatGPT about a bunch of "edge" cases, or questions that require a lot of inference, it will not do well. But if you ask ChatGPT about topics that are fairly well understood and researched, it can write a very coherent reply.

As an experiment, I used ChatGPT to write a programming book about FORTRAN77. I wrote it over a week in January. It took me longer to map out the book's outline and to figure out what questions to ask ChatGPT than for ChatGPT to generate its responses. You might learn FORTRAN77 by reading this book, but that wasn't the point of writing it. I was experimenting with ChatGPT to see how far I could push it. I picked FORTRAN77 as my topic for two reasons:

(1) FORTRAN77 has been around for a long time, so a lot has already been written about it. This is a well researched topic and I figured ChatGPT would have a lot to work with. And it did.

(2) I thought it was funny to ask an AI to write about FORTRAN77 in 2023. Because let's face it, I did the book for fun.

Some interesting things here: ChatGPT generates text that is of "average" complexity and sentence length. There weren't any really short sentences, nor any really long sentences. Everything was kind of "moderate" length. Also, in the 80 pages of the book, the only semicolons were in the code, or in my end-of-chapter commentary. ChatGPT doesn't seem to use semicolons in its writing.

Another interesting thing is that you need to be careful of errors. If you're relying on an AI to do the writing, then you need to fact-check it. In the book, ChatGPT boldly claimed code samples were FORTRAN77 but then it wrote something else, probably some more recent version of Fortran. (I stopped programming in FORTRAN77 as an undergraduate in the early 1990s, just as Fortran90 was starting to replace F77. So I don't know the later editions of Fortran.) Based on other experiments I've done, I think if you (a human) know a topic fairly well, you can probably catch most (or all?) of any errors that ChatGPT makes. But you need to be careful and watch closely. If you're using ChatGPT's output verbatim, that fact-checking and editing phase might outweight its usefulness. But if you're using ChatGPT as a starting point to write something on your own, then that might be okay.

I think we're still in the early days of AI. Today, you're seeing a lot of people using ChatGPT to write annual goals, or to respond to exam questions, or to write a book - and we're all "wow'ed" by that right now. If you set the clock ahead 5 or 10 years, we'll all use AI as some kind of "co-author." It won't seem weird anymore.

Congratulations to the FreeDOS people, I was given an old (P2 or P1) that will be nice to setup with FreeDOS. I have not looked at that system yet, so wish me luck :)

Thanks! And thanks for trying the new FreeDOS 1.3. It should work fine on a Pentium or Pentium-2. That's basicalliy how I have my virtual machine set up for emulation. :-)

It is a big install if you install everything. It's much smaller (about 20MB) if you install just a "plain DOS" system. You can make it even smaller if you do a custom install (boot the LiveCD and do a manual install .. or run SETUP ADV from the LiveCD for a custom install) on small systems. We also have a floppy-only version that is very small, and appropriate for low-end systems like '286 computers and other classic systems.

Yup, we still have some things on SourceForge. Our website is hosted elsewhere, but SourceForge still hosts our email lists and wiki, for example.

The news summary might have included more of the announcement to share what's new here:

This contains a bunch of great new features and improvements since the 1.2 release, including: new FreeCOM 0.85a, new Kernel 2043 and an 8086 version with FAT32 support, floppy edition now uses compression and requires about half as many diskettes, the return of networking, some new programs and games, many many many package updates, some updates and improvements to NLS, improved install process, especially with the MBR, some support to automatically set the COUNTRY.SYS information, improved CD initialization for the boot media and installed system, .. and much, much more!

And:

Check the Readme for more details. You'll need 20MB to install a "Plain DOS system," or about 275MB for a "Full installation including applications and games." You can find other optional packages on the BonusCD. For a list of everything included in FreeDOS 1.3, including what's installed and what's available to install, read the release report file.

There have been a ton of package updates here, as expected. The FreeDOS 1.3 release also has a bunch of translation and internationalization improvements. The package descriptions in the installer are also much improved.

I'll add my own here: I recorded a YouTube video series about C programming on FreeDOS. It's "FreeDOS" in the title because I did this as part of my work on FreeDOS, but C runs everywhere. Almost everything from the series (except the part about console programming with conio) transfers to C programming on Linux.

I also wrote a web programming guide, which has embedded videos from YouTube. The web programming guide also contains more information than I could cover in the videos, including code samples that you can copy/paste, practice programming, and solutions to the practice programming. You can find it here:

"Writing FreeDOS Programs in C"

(There's also an updated print version of the programming guide, which you can buy on Lulu. And I'm working on an updated version for a publisher, about C programming on Linux, to be released in late Q1 2021.)

Agreed. Star Wars would be more interesting if they got away from the "good vs evil" trope.

IMO, I would have preferred the sequel trilogy to expand on the "there is no Light Side or Dark Side, there's just The Force" concept that we started to explore in the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars and explored further Star Wars: Rebels. I'm not saying bring those characters into the sequel trilogy, but I would have preferred they explore the "greyness" of The Force.

This would have brought something new to the sequel trilogy, and given me a reason to care.

As it is, The Force Awakens was a by-the-numbers "okay" story that bordered on cosplay, and The Last Jedi was boring. I have no interest in seeing Rise of Skywalker in the theaters, I'll wait until it hits rental.

I'd love to see FreeDOS on Raspberry Pi .. but unfortunately I don't see it happening. Like any DOS, FreeDOS makes certain assumptions about the system. FreeDOS requires an Intel CPU and a BIOS. The Raspberry Pi is an ARM CPU, and doesn't have a BIOS.

But that's not to say that it's impossible to put FreeDOS on a Raspberry Pi, on bare metal. Before Pat Villani contributed his kernel to FreeDOS, the predecessor kernel (DOS/NT) actually ran on the M68k. The FreeDOS kernel has seen considerable updates since then, though.

Running FreeDOS on a Raspberry Pi these days can only be done in an emulator. More info here: Running DOS on the Raspberry Pi

It's an interesting hobby. There's a challenge to do big things in a small address space like DOS. You can't just assume a flat memory model with a ton of memory and disk. You have to write very tight code that is very efficient.

I work on a lot of other things, though. The last question in the interview asked about that. I've written or contributed to dozens of open source projects, but FreeDOS is the one I'm best known for.

For example: I also do usability testing in open source software, and specifically with GNOME.

DOSBox does a great job with games. I understand it doesn't always do well with applications, so FreeDOS is great for applications. I also just like the experience of running a full DOS. :-)

And if you need to boot FreeDOS on an actual machine (for example: BIOS updates) then you need an actual DOS operating system like FreeDOS. An emulator like DOSBox won't do that.

Personally, I use FreeDOS most of the time, running in QEMU (I run Linux as my desktop OS). But I do use DOSBox occasionally. For example, I play one of my games in DOSBox because it's a bit easier there than trying to run it in FreeDOS. (Some DOS games need to run on slower hardware, and DOSBox has an option to emulate that.)

Thanks! We're really glad people like using FreeDOS!

Speaking for myself, FreeDOS is a great hobby. Some people play golf in their spare time, I write code and give it away. I just love working with open source! (And I guess I have to love it, if I'm going to work in open source for this long.)

You're welcome!

There are lots of people out there who helped make FreeDOS and keep it going. It's not just me. I'm sure there is a FreeDOS person near you who will happily accept a beer! :-)

Except that the DR-DOS source code (called OpenDOS) was not really open source. It was under a "look but do not touch" license.

According to the OpenDOS license, you were allowed to view the source code of OpenDOS but were not allowed to modify it. You could not reuse any code in other projects, and you could not apply what you had learned by looking at the OpenDOS code in other projects. So DR-DOS (OpenDOS) was never really "open sourced."

I'd be really interested in seeing Microsoft release the source code to MS-DOS 5 or later under a similar open source software license. Microsoft essentially rewrote MS-DOS for version 5, probably using a lot of C, and would theoretically include more modern programming techniques.

It's nice that they re-released these older versions under a more acceptable open source software license, though.