Jim Hall is best known as the computer programmer who founded the FreeDOS project. Jim began the project in 1994 as a replacement for MS-DOS while he

How a college student founded a free and open source operating system | Opensource.com

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Jim Hall is best known as the computer programmer who founded the FreeDOS project. Jim began the project in 1994 as a replacement for MS-DOS while he was still a student at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. Jim created FreeDOS in response to Microsoft ending support for MS-DOS in 1994. Recently Jim agreed to an email interview. Correspondent Joshua Allen Holm joined me in posing the following questions to Jim.

I think even a beginner can get started writing an operating system like FreeDOS, although it would take a more advanced programmer to write the kernel.

I am a self-taught programmer. I learned about programming from an early age by tinkering on our Apple II computer at home. Much later, I learned C programming—my brother was a computer science student when I was a physics student, and he introduced me to C. I picked up the rest by reading books and writing my own programs.

I wrote a lot of small utilities that enhanced my command line on MS-DOS or even replaced certain DOS commands. And you can write a lot of those programs even with a basic level of programming experience. You can write file utilities like FIND, FC, CHOICE, TYPE, MORE, or COPY—or user commands like ECHO or CLS—with only an introduction to C programming. With a bit of practice, you can write system-level programs like ATTRIB, or the COMMAND shell.