Ancient Web: Free Software for DOS Outlived Its Maintainer

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

An old DOS program might still exist in a ZIP archive, but that does not tell you whether it required a serial port, supported long filenames, or worked on a 286. Free Software for DOS tried to keep the explanations together with the names.

Visit the preserved Free Software for DOS guide.

The site's own history and FAQ dates its origin to November 1994, when Richard L. Green began listing favorite free DOS applications. It later moved among a university server, Sprynet, GeoCities, a dedicated DOS domain, and other hosts. Steven 'Short.Stop' Adelewitz maintained the project in its later years.

The surviving copy is dated August 21, 2006. Following Adelewitz's death in January 2009, BTTR Software preserved the pages, explaining that it had added only a memorial notice rather than revising the underlying guide.

One thousand programs, not a pile of downloads

The homepage advertises descriptions and links to more than a thousand applications, explicitly excluding games. Categories include file managers, terminal programs, archivers, programming languages, graphics, disk utilities, communications tools, and text editors.

A communications page gives a remarkably detailed description of Kermit: supported terminal emulations, modem and network connections, memory requirements, serial-port behavior, and operating-system compatibility. Such annotations are valuable because old download collections often preserve a binary file while losing the explanation of what it did.

The editors insist that their work is a selective guide, not an archive hosting the actual software. Their about page warns about outdated file systems, long-filename limitations, Year 2000 problems, and the need to check downloaded programs. It rejects treating commercially copyrighted abandonware as automatically free.

The old statistics are unusually revealing. The guide reports 53 HTML pages, approximately 1,200 external links, and more than 132,000 words. Its historical GeoCities figures list individual category-page visits; these are self-reported site records rather than independently audited traffic.

Most poignant is the option to download a ZIP containing the site's HTML pages and another for its graphics. Even before preservation became urgent, the editor wanted readers to keep local copies.

Explore the categorized listings and the editors' history.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.