Microsoft 'Re-Open Sources' MS-DOS on GitHub (microsoft.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Microsoft's Developer blog: In March 2014, Microsoft released the source code to MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 via the Computer History Museum. The announcement also contains a brief history of how MS-DOS came to be for those new to the subject, and ends with many links to related articles and resources for those interested in learning more. Today, we're re-open-sourcing MS-DOS on GitHub. Why? Because it's much easier to find, read, and refer to MS-DOS source files if they're in a GitHub repo than in the original downloadable compressed archive file.... Enjoy exploring the initial foundations of a family of operating systems that helped fuel the explosion of computer technology that we all rely upon for so much of our modern lives!
While non-source modifications are welcome, "The source will be kept static," reads a note on the GitHub repo, "so please don't send Pull Requests suggesting any modifications to the source files."

"But feel free to fork this repo and experiment!"

Comments

MS-DOS and Intel x86 cpus were a setback

[presidenteloco]

To software reliability (and good design) that has taken decades to dig out of.

The chip architecture and machine language was overcomplicated (non orthogonal instruction set, segmented memory architecture) and the OS was by far the least elegant available at the time, with bizarre irregular commands and options, and horrible limitations making programming much harder than it ought to have been, due to the chip and memory architecture.
There were much better alternatives, from a technical perspective, at a similar low price point, like Z80, M68000, CPM, AmigaOS, etc.
And far far technically superior things like Sun/RISC/Solaris were soon available, albeit much too pricey for common use.

It's one of my lesser disappointments in humanity that Wintel stuff managed to dominate despite its inner hideousness.

Re:"Please don't send Pull Requests..."

[voss]

The last standalone version of ms-DOS was 6.22. Id rather use DOSbox than msdos 2