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Lineo Frees CP/M

Posted by timothy on from the if-you-have-the-hardware dept.

rbeattie writes: "The Register is reporting that the code for 'the first generic operating system for microcomputers' is now open source. It's interesting to see the final chapter for the code that could have been what was MS-DOS. The article includes the requisite background of CP/M from Gary Kildall's snubbing of IBM to its transformation into DR-DOS, later being sold to Novell then to Caldera who spun it off with Lineo who finally opened up the source in October." The original story is actually at NewsForge. Update: 11/27 22:13 GMT by T : Note, thanks to reader Greg Head, that DR-DOS source appears available only for money; the original headline implied that DR-DOS source was also now available at no charge.

5 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Day late and a dollar short by Tassach · · Score: 5, Insightful
    While it is commendable to open the source to a defunct product rather than keep it in some kind of propriatary graveyard, this release comes too late to make any practical impact. The few niches where a lightweight DOS kernel would still be useful have pretty much been filled by better alternatives.



    Considering how far the Windows product line has diverged from it's MS-DOS roots, even the hope of finding code that's useful for interoperability with M$ systems is pretty slim. Sadly, I can see little practial value to this announcement other than academic and historical interest.

    --
    Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
    1. Re:Day late and a dollar short by nels_tomlinson · · Score: 4, Informative
      You might want to look into FreeDos, which is an MSDOS compatible, GPL'ed dos which works fairly well. It's beta, but it's there NOW.

      --
      See what I've been reading.
  2. Actual MS-DOS source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    believe it or not, the actual MS inhouse source for MS-DOS 6.2 is floating around on a WarezSiteNearYou(tm). No idea how it got out, but it's out. It's interesting mainly for its comments and revision logs, and all the unfixed bugs they released it with (about 266, if grep ain't lying to me - they flag it with the string BUGBUG - and those are only the ones they know about!).

    It's a 19mb (approx) tarball which blows up to 70mb. I got it as dos-6.0-src.tar.gz. About half of that bloat is the code for QBASIC and associated bits n bobs (edit, help) which are made with "COW" - Character Oriented Windows - hey, they tried for cool acronyms.

    I've tried posting some of it here for the last 10 mins, but I can't beat the "Lameness filter - please use fewer 'junk' characters". If anyone wants to tell me how to get around it....

    Meanwhile I'll leave you with a revision note from around 1983 or so:

    REV 1.50
    Some code for new 2.0 DOS, sort of HACKey. Not enough time to
    do it right.

  3. New life for C128 by SomeoneGotMyNick · · Score: 4, Funny
    Does this mean I can FINALLY upgrade the CP/M for my Commodore 128?

    Lately, the Z-80 CPU in there only gets to boot the machine and never does any other computing.

    -----

  4. Re:no matter what anyone says... by Sj0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I had found several ways to do multitasking dos easily, and at least one of them was pmode.

    First: OS/2 warp allowed you to use a text mode shell, which would be multitaskable and pmoded. That was a long time ago... The only one of these other than windows(which is a bitch about it) which will run Quake multitaksing.

    Second: TSX411 allowed for multitasking in text mode and in some CGA modes, and it also allowed for VGA modes to run normally, but I haven't heard anything about it since the early 80s.

    Third: Fallback Windows 3.1 with command.com set as the shell. Not my favourite solution...

    Fourth: Linux with dosemu: I'd really rather not get into why this is a bad idea for day to day use, but it has something to do with never being able to run shell 0 apps and general instability in regular apps.

    The reason for all this research is simple: At one time I learned about most of these(early 80s), windows sucked so badly nobody used it (whereas today, MS marketing(Bill Gates considers 1984 an instruction manual, not a novel) has convinced everybody to use it...), and multitasking under DOS was cool and innovative. Secondly, I'm a dos programmer right now (moving to linux with my next project to avoid Windows "He made a nice program -- lets clone it!" XP), and multitasking comes in handy, but the crashability of Windows is bad when I'm trying to make something work..

    --
    It's been a long time.