MS-DOS is still widely used in embedded, MS still sells it to OEMs. There is also the Free and Open Freedos. Maybe you have a small program you developed on Linux and maintain on several OS's, and you don't want to go through the nightmare of maintaining a DOS port as well.

I'm pretty sure it's a joke or "because we can" project, not something someone would seriously use

/dev/sda? Case sensitive file system?

Why would anyone who can run DOS run Linux?

On a more constructive note, MS-DOS and Windows operate on a fundamentally different philosophy from UNIX. That doesn't make them inherently bad. The vast majority of users even relate better (FSVO better) to the way Windows does it.

> On a more constructive note, MS-DOS and Windows operate on a fundamentally different philosophy from UNIX

Not sure I follow. There are many concepts in DOS that are the same as Unix: pipes, redirecting output, stdout, stdin, and stderr. DOS's batch language was limited, but conceptually it allowed for very Unix like chaining of commands. I suppose you could argue / vs - for command line paramaters... but conceptually they were similar. Unix file systems could be case sensitive or not.

I think about the only thing that philosophically was all that different was drive letters, multitasking and multiuser. Unix didn't do drive letters, and DOS didn't do multitasking and multiuser. Eventually Windows did, and grew up to compete nicely with Unix.

The things you feel are Microsoft, didn’t originate with Microsoft. MS-DOS was a 16 bit clone of CP/M for the 8086. CP/M was loosely designed in the fashion of TOPS-10 from DEC. Windows was originally a graphical shell over DOS loosely modeled off of Xerox’s technology, and Windows NT’s internals took very liberally from VMS.

If we compare this pedigree to that of UNIX, UNIX would appear to be the brain dead system. Multics was largely a disaster, and it informed many parts of UNIX’s design, but UNIX was written largely to allow Ken Thompson to play an early video game (that he wrote), Space Travel.

The two systems just have very different origins and very different designs based upon their initial use cases. However, people thinking that DOS or Windows are somehow less-than is just ignorant of history, and I say this as someone who loathes modern Windows.

"That thing was a disaster, so let's do the opposite of it" isn't more brain-dead than "let's superficially copy the familiar/trendy thing". (I say "superficially" with regard to TOPS-10→CP/M→DOS and Xerox→Windows copying; the VMS→NT copying is a much more in-depth influence and hiring of talent.)

I agree, but also CP/M to DOS wasn’t superficial. When Paterson did the Z80 port of MS-DOS by running it through an assembly language translator he’d written for the task, the resulting MSX-DOS could run quite a bit of CP/M software without issue. The only major problem was MSX-DOS disk formats using Microsoft’s FAT filesystem. This isn’t unusual though since many CP/M machines had incompatible disk formats anyway.

> case insensitive file system?

ah, yes, that's handy for when you really need readme.txt, Readme.txt, README.txt, README.TXT, ReAdMe.TxT all to reside in the same folder :)