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It turns out the Documentation page addresses some of this, though not in detail. Scroll down to the FAQ section.

https://www.dr-dos.com/documentation.html

The Wikipedia page describes some past legal troubles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS

What this doesn't really address to me is why DR-DOS. That documentation uses a lot of flowery language to say nothing or close to nothing.

I'm too young to have used DR-DOS in anger (so I may be missing some key feature), but it seems like the entire point of DR-DOS would have been its source code legacy and accumulated feature set.

Here, my immediate question is why not FreeDOS? I'd guess it was system requirements, but according to the documentation DR-DOS 9 requires 2 MB of RAM minimum and a 386!!

I have used a DR-DOS 7 that was set up with a nice task switcher, between terminate-and-stay-resident programs ( not true concurrent processing ).

This setup started WP5.1, a spread sheet -- I think Lotus123, and a graphics editing program. I think it switches using cntrl and the F keys, similar in feel to how a linux machine switches consoles.

I think at the time this was set up, only DR-DOS could do the task switching. I don't know if that is still true.

MS-DOS/PC-DOS 4+ DOSSHELL has a task switcher.

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