Pat Villani

Pasquale "Pat" J. Villani[1] (18 April 1954 – 27 August 2011) was an American computer programmer, author, and advocate of free software, best known for his creation of DOS-C, a DOS emulator written in the C language and subsequently adapted as the kernel of the FreeDOS operating system and a number of other projects including DOSEMU for Linux.

[3] He added an IPL to set up a boot environment before loading the actual operating system and developed an MS-DOS-compatible frontend API to applications.

Villani was born in Nocera Inferiore[8] near Naples, Italy,[1] grew up in Brooklyn,[9] New York, USA, and moved to Freehold Township,[8] New Jersey in 1990.

[10] In 2008, he also received a master's certificate in Project Management from George Washington University and he was an adjunct professor at Brookdale Community College beginning in 2010.

He previously worked for Stratus Computers, Inc.[10] on their Continuum fault-tolerant product line and also as a consultant for AT&T Bell Laboratories.