Recently I've installed FreeDOS inside a VM, both out of curiosity and for my assembly course homework. FreeDOS, for the unfamiliar readers, is a 100% compatible GPL'd DOS OS. It ships with many modern utils such as ssh (Yes, it has Ethernet + TCP/IP support.. EVIL!), lynx, vim, a graphical web browser..
I was astonished to find out this very-active blog, which proved me that DOS is still alive! A new version of 4DOS was just released a few days ago, who'd believe...
A very nice work, though I don't see too many reasons for using DOS nowadays (except for nostalgia and for playing old dos games).. It's still a deprecated, single-tasking, not protected-mode, no package-management OS.. And hardware configuration can be hell, well.
For running old DOS games I discovered that DOSBox does a good job.
Well, I was told that at one year in the late 90's Caldera sold three times as many copies of DOS as it did the previous year. That's because many hardware people use DOS for testing hardware and for other uses like that, where doing it using Linux (much less Windows NT) is much more trouble and less straightforward.
I personally am using the Dosbox x86+DOS emulator for running old games and for other DOS-like needs.
I have installed dual boot with Windows, Dos on my father computer.
My father still need DOS to run some programs he owns (Hashavshevet and more).
It appears that a lot of people in the industry still need it.
(I used MS-dos, I haven\'t try Freedos with his software yet, maybe sometime).
Another problems we had that this software requires floppy and Parallel connection to the printer, and these ports becoming very rare in recent MBs.