Use this nostalgic text editor on FreeDOS: 
In the very early days of DOS, the standard editor was a no-frills line editor called Edlin. Tim Paterson wrote the original Edlin for the first version of DOS, then called 86-DOS and later branded PC-DOS and MS-DOS. Paterson has commented that he meant to replace Edlin eventually, but it wasn’t until ten years later that MS-DOS 5 (1991) replaced Edlin with Edit, a full-screen editor.
read more: Opensource.com Jim Hall
Supporting Open Source.
Have you tried: Diving with Sharks?