If you'd like to see what FreeDOS looked like in the early days, I have shared the Alpha5 and Beta1 "distributions" on Ibiblio. These were *very early* and require a minimal DOS environment to start from. Alpha5 is just tools, Beta1 was the first version to include Pat Villani's kernel. https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/pre-1.0/