30-Year-Old Operating System 'PC-MOS/386' Finally Open Sourced (github.com)

PC-MOS/386 "was a multi-user, computer multitasking operating system...announced at COMDEX in November 1986," remembers Wikipedia, saying it runs many MS-DOS titles (though it's optimized for the Intel 80386 processor).

Today Slashdot user Roeland Jansen writes: After some tracking, racing and other stuff...PC-MOS/386 v5.01 is open source under GPLv3. Back in May he'd posted to a virtualization site that "I still have the source tapes. I want(ed) to make it GPL and while I got an OK on it, I haven't had time nor managed to get it legalized. E.g. lift the NDA and be able to publish."

1987 magazine ads described it as "the gateway to the latest technology...and your networking future," and 30 years later its release on GitHub includes sources and executables. "In concert with Gary Robertson and Rod Roark it has been decided to place all under GPL v3."

Comments

Reboot

[thereitis]

"One does not simply reboot" - Boromir

Sometimes I actually miss the complexity of assembler. Or maybe I just hate the 12 layers of abstraction that encompasses so many things these days. In a way it's not complexity of assembler I miss: it's the simplicity of knowing exactly what the computer is going to do.

Re:GPL DOS

[Ol Olsoc]

So, there is now a GPL operating system that will run DOS applications. That's pretty interesting.

If there were still sufficient "must have" DOS applications that could benefit from a little source code tweaking ("because I can!")

An old Ham called me up and wanted a way to run DOS on his W10 computer. He had programs he'd been using since the early 90's, his Windows 95 computer gave up the ghost, and he didn't want to change. I gave him some hints, but he didn't like it when I said the best idea was to start using software that wasn't written 30 years ago.