Charlie Somerville, a software engineer in Melbourne, told that he developed the DOS Subsystem for Linux (DSL) as he enjoys system programming and has an interest in retro computing, expecially 1990s Microsoft DOS and Windows things.
Inspired by Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Somerville wrote DSL as an amusement.
I first started out just seeing if I could get Linux booting from the DOS command line, and that turned out to be straightforward enough so I thought it’d be fun to see if I could continue executing DOS once Linux was running.
Somerville said.
In conclusion, people are seeing “DOS Subsystem for Linux” and thinking that this enables you run DOS on Linux. There are a ton of comments that seem to be misunderstanding what this software is. So, DSL creates a WSL-like environment on a DOS host system. It does not create a DOS environment on a Linux host.
DSL is available on the Github open source code repository, and has been tried out with MS-DOS 6.22 and FreeDOS.
