Web site: www.pdos.org
Origin: unknown
Category: Desktop
Desktop environment: CLI
Architecture: x86
Based on: Independent
Wikipedia:
Media: Live
The last version | Released: unknown
Public Domain Operating System (PDOS) – an operating system, with a user interface as simple as MSDOS, but behind the scenes the story is quite different.
One distribution supports both 32-bit Windows (subset) and 32-bit MSDOS (there was never a real one of those). One distribution supports 16-bit MSDOS (subset). One distribution supports the MVS API (subset) in AMODE 24, 31, 32 and 64 (but only uses the lower 32 bits in AMODE 64).
Base functionality of PDOS/386 has now been completed. No further functionality is required for a basic functional system. There are also no longer any known, reproducible integrity bugs, so the system is nominally stable (but make sure you regularly back up any work for now). It is self-hosting, allowing both the OS and the tools to be rebuilt under PDOS/386.
The most commonly used component, thanks to GCCMVS (port of GCC to IBM mainframe) is PDPCLIB which is a public domain C runtime library which you can link your own C programs against to produce executables with no licencing restrictions (even if you use a compiler, commercial or non-commercial, that does have licencing restrictions). PDPCLIB works on MSDOS, OS/2, Win32, PDOS/386, MVS (mainframe), CMS, VSE, AmigaOS. The library conforms to the ISO/IEC 9899:1990 (aka ANSI X3.159-1989 aka C90 aka C89) standard. It has no extensions so is particularly good at finding out if your code is truly portable.
