Microsoft and IBM make MS-DOS 4.00 Open-Source
Microsoft and IBM make MS-DOS 4.00 Open-Source
alternativeto.net
Just a moment...
24 comments
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Assembly 85.0%C 13.1%-
I was shocked as I went through the source struggling to find any modules that had C. Craziness.
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MIT License
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Will it help improve wine? If yes, great! If no, I geuss it's a great learning tool for new OS devs.
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It could be helpful for dosbox devs.
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As someone who has done some OS dev, it’s not likely to be of much help. DOS didn’t have much of any of the defining features of most modern OS’s — it barely had a kernel, there was no multitasking, no memory management, no memory protection, no networking, and everything ran at the same privilege level. What little bit of an API was there was purely through a handful of software interrupts — otherwise, it was up to your code to communicate with nearly all the hardware directly (or to communicate with whatever bespoke device driver your hardware required).
This is great for anyone that wants to provide old-school DOS compatibility, and could be useful in the far future to aid in “digital archaeology” (i.e.: being able to run old 80’s and early 90’s software for research and archival purposes on “real DOS”) — but that’s about it. DOS wasn’t even all that modern for its time — we have much better tools to use and learn from for designing OS’s today.
As a sort of historical perspective this is useful, but not likely for anything else.
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Extremely enlightening comment here.
Sounds like IBM kindof got ripped off. Seems about right for Gates/Ballmer/Microsoft.
And I bet a lot more of that jank is still in modern Windows than I'd like to think about.
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I'd like to see the same for 5 and dos4gw. Could potentially help with maintaining legacy stuff.
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The only reason they would ever open source something like this is because there's no practical use for it in modern-day computing.
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Yeah. This is Microsoft we're talking about.
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DosBox gonna get a boost?
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MIT license too, huh. I was sort of expecting a more restrictive one because, well, Microsoft and IBM
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They could not care less, this is so ancient and irrelevant.
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Something being ancient and irrelevant tdoesn't stop a lot of companies.
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Then once all the problems are fixed, make it private again.
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Even Windows XP is unofficially open source at this point.
24 comments
Great.
This should be the standard for old retired software.
No. This is not great. This is older than all of my kids. Fuck.. this is older than my partner. This is not a good thing, this is far beyond the point where it should be open source. Where the fuck is DOS 6.22? Eh? Or Windows 3.11? This is stupid and dumb. Not to be celebrated.
So should it not have been done at all because it wasn't enough for you?
The historical value alone it already a reason for it to become open source.
I see the crack, but where is the happy?