What a beautiful project…In 1994, Jim Hall, at the time a Physics student at University of Wisconsin-River, was shocked at Bill Gates announcement that the soon-to-come release of Windows 95 would toll the bell of MS-DOS maintenance investments.

A poor hacker then, Jim Hall took the lead of the DOS-lovers wave and started programming a DOS-like operating system. Soon joined by hundreds of programmers worldwide, who have been working for about a decade, FreeDOS has just released its open-source, 100% re-written version of MS-DOS.

Although not MS-DOS proficient at all, I can understand the use of it: we all have dusty x86 machines somewhere in the basement. Rediscover Doom, Dune, Civilization and Alone in the Dark, or programming in Pascal or Fortran again for a few days can probably be insightful on the use of computers and its impact on Society – and remind you of some good memories.

Have a look at the FreeDOS project website. They’re still looking for programmers to polish their current version of DOS by the way…

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Second episode of my Week-End Quizz. I’ll keep the structure identical as last week: the guess first, and the next day a complementary post about the same IT industry leader. This one’s pretty easy too – but we need to start somewhere, don’t we? Those who know me personally can enjoy a little advantage since this week’s entrepreneur is one of the few ones I often talk about, and admire most. To all: enjoy and good luck! There you go:

“I was raised on Chicago’s South Side – a district once described by Look magazine as the worst black ghetto in the United States. After dropping out (like Bill Gates) from mathematics studies at the University of Chicago, I moved to California, where I worked as a software programmer for a few years. My employer’s main shareholder was an Asian corporation, which helped me travel to its home country and discover a culture that completely changed my approach to business. In 1976, IBM made me spot a market opportunity (like Bill Gates) through the publication of a research paper describing the technology from which I started my own company alongside with 2 partners. We tried to raise money from VCs but do you think they would mind to return our calls or reply to our mail (snail at that time)? We eventually managed to get going and from Day One, our company never underwent a year of financial losses: our revenues have always exceeded our expenses. We IPOed in 1986. Year in year out, the competition on the market became tougher. This led me to making a significant decision in the middle of the 90s: the company would cut investing on its flagship product to focus on the rise of the Internet. Although it looked like gambling, my company has since then remained the leading innovator in the industry – launching for instance the first electronic business exchange system back in 1999. Who am I?”

Easy one, I told you…

Update: congratulations to François-Albert Gandon who blew away today’s “Guess Who?”. The IT entrepreneur in question was Larry Ellison, the founder and long-time CEO of database and ERP company Oracle. In the introducing text above, Ellison had moved from Chicago to Berkeley, CA, where he worked for Amdahl, at that time 45% owned by Japanese kereitzu Fujitsu. The research paper IBM published was on the SQL (sequel) database technology. In the very last sentence, I made use of the word ‘gambling’ to give you a lead towards the outgoing, extravagant, not to say extreme but still probably great way of life Larry Ellison enjoys.

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