Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the back-to-the-future dept.

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!"

2 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Important caveat by Jim+Hall · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I would like to see them release the source code for something interesting like Windows 95 and NT 4 into the public domain. Wake me when that happens. Maybe the "good parts" (I know, don't say it) could be merged into something like ReactOS and we'll have a decent Freedom Windows stable equivelent of FreeDOS.

    I'd be really interested in seeing Microsoft release the source code to MS-DOS 5 or later under a similar open source software license. Microsoft essentially rewrote MS-DOS for version 5, probably using a lot of C, and would theoretically include more modern programming techniques.

    It's nice that they re-released these older versions under a more acceptable open source software license, though.

  2. The toys from that time period. No networks by raymorris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    To be precise, Windows 1-3.1 didn't come with networking. The "real" computers of the era ran network operating systems such as Unix. A DISK Operating System (DOS) , as opposed to a network operating system, for a PERSONAL computer (PC) was the oddball. Toys people played with at home ran Windows. It turned out to be a brilliant strategy as personal home computers developed into useful machines.

    It worked really well for them from about 1988-1995. Then in 1995 the world wide web happened and an OS centered around the idea of only working locally eschewing the network-based model that preceded it suddenly was a big problem. Networking was back bigger than ever, and Microsoft had bet on DISK OS, rejecting the idea of the network. Microsoft execs were freaked out.

    Worse, Microsoft had just spent years developing the next big thing, an extension of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) called COM. In any document, you could embed or link to some other file type. A Word document could link to a spreadsheet, or embed an image. It was amazing. It better be amazing - they had bet big on it.

    Then they saw "a href" and "img src". Everything Microsoft had spent the last four years doing was suddenly replaced by a friggin tag.

    Forshort time tried to stop the WWW from growing, but there was no way to stop it. Microsoft renamed COM (aka OLE) to "ActiveX" and tried to market it as an internet technology. We all know how well that went.