Dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms

Took a bit to find it, but the license for the library is given at the bottom of dos.h

It's available under either MIT or Unlicense (public domain)

MS-DOS filenames were too short to be useful, but the systems once up and running, tended to run until they were obsoleted. MS-DOS itself is mostly just a program loader, with a bit of file system API to make programming easier. The nice thing was that it was simple, could be backed up easily, and stuff worked as expected, for decades, if necessary.

The other thing is we didn't have to worry about security (much). Because everything could be backed up, and a known safe system state was achievable, and you could even write protect non-hard drive based machines, you could run ANYTHING, and there was nowhere in the hardware for malware to hide if things got squirrely and you rebooted.

You could always just reboot from a write protected system disk, and get back to work. This is a level of security that hasn't been matched since, except for mainframes with their fixed assignment of resources.

I wrote a system that recorded inspections of equipment, involved hand held computers, and a weird Emulex serial card to talk to them. The code was all in Turbo Pascal, with PL/N running on the handhelds. I supported it for a decade until Windows and Networking made things obsolete. It was a great job.

I was a big fan of 80x50 or 80x43 character screen mode.

I suggest that you need to look at the historical context of it.

When DOS was the uncontested king of business computing, user interfaces were all over the place. Every app had its own UI, its own keystrokes, its own everything.

To steal some text I wrote for Wikipedia:

In WordPerfect, the command to open a file was F7, 3.

In Lotus 1-2-3, a file was opened with / (to open the menus), F (for File), R (for Retrieve).

In Microsoft Word, a file was opened with Esc (to open the menus), T (for Transfer), L (for Load).

It was a mess and a significant effort to learn multiple apps.

Then classic MacOS and MS Windows started to introduce the idea of uniform UIs, where programs had the same menu bar with the same core menus with the same commands on them, opened and navigated with the same keystrokes.

It made life so much easier. A lot of apps came across, even big-name ones -- for instance MS Word (v5.0, proprietary 2-line menus at the bottom of the screen; v5.5, CUA menu bar); WordPerfect (added CUA menus in v5); Borland Quattro; etc.

And if you have a standard menu bar, then you more or less need to have dialog boxes as part of the UI.

Once you go that far, you may as well apply it to multiple documents support and so on.

And so you end up with a familiar, more-or-less harmonious UI across different apps from different vendors, and for the first time it became possible to operate a program you'd never seen before first time.

This was a huge win for usability, accessibility, and it saved time, effort and stress for millions of people.

It was a triumph. That UI persists today in most modern FOSS apps and desktops, except for intentional rebels like GNOME 3, who want to make us all use phones with big screens.

If I am going to use a text editor, say, in the shell sometimes, then YES I want it to use the same UI I have in my GUI session, with the same keystrokes and menu options. Life is much to short to learn some crappy half-assed UI from the 1970s because a bunch of old dudes with beards have loved it ever since.

Even if I am an old dude with a beard now.

I once wrote a web front-end for a DOS-era web application that was used at over 2,000 locations by hundreds of thousands of people. It was virtually identical to the original layout and functionality, but it had basic-yet-functional HTML look to it. Think Google search.

On the 1st of April it would instead switch to a "DOS skin" using the fixedsys font and the original colour theme and box-drawing character layout. Virtually identical to the original, except that some things were centred and you could scroll with a mouse.

I thought it was hilarious.

Management... not so much.

In fact, DOS Shell used a real graphics mode as well.