Jim Hall (computer programmer)

Hall began writing the free replacement for the MS-DOS operating system in 1994 when he was still a physics student[1] at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

[3] Hall has said he created FreeDOS in response to Microsoft announcing end of support for MS-DOS in 1994,[1] a year before Windows 95 was released.

I am excited about PD-DOS, and I am hoping I can get a group started!Within a few weeks, other programmers including Pat Villani and Tim Norman joined the project.

A kernel, the COMMAND.COM command line interpreter (shell) and core utilities were created by pooling code they had written or found available.

Hall is also the original developer of GNU Robots, but he is no longer active on this project and has since handed maintainership over to Tim Northover.