Microsoft makes MS-DOS and Word for Windows source code public
http://www.computerhistory.org/press/ms-source-code.html
http://www.computerhistory.org/press/ms-source-code.html
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Microsoft makes MS-DOS and Word for Windows source code public
- Thread starter johnim
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bout darn time dos came open source.
HOORAY!
Maybe we will see some better compatibility for modern hardware now
HOORAY!
Maybe we will see some better compatibility for modern hardware now
I guess the source code of itself is written in Assembler isnt it?
I would guess most of it would be in C with speed critical parts in assembler? Either way it will be complicated stuff and not much use to the average user. It amazes me people can rework complex programs in their free time as if they were reading a paper.
commodorejohn
Shameless recidivist
If it's anything like the copy I've got, it's mostly assembler, but there's a lot of plain OBJ files without matching source in that copy so I'm not certain.
Edit: oh, it's only v1-2? Screw that. Give us the DOS 6 source, Microsoft!
Edit: oh, it's only v1-2? Screw that. Give us the DOS 6 source, Microsoft!
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well why not dos-6 nothing is built on it any more.
Retrograde
Member
[semi-rant on]
... which should equate to about 4-5 pages of mixed C source and maybe some assembler throw in for good measure.
What a god-awful "OS"-series MS-DOS is/was.
I read the article and it's only v1.1 and 2.0 so even more useless.
(yes I'm in a bad mood with a headache so factor that in...)
Edit: Actually strike that I stand for everything.
I kept reading and pretty much all of DOS 1x/2x it is in assembler, I was surprised.
Oh well, it's still a very basic and clunky series of operating systems at best, in fact I don't even qualify them as such.
Mostly a simplistic shell, a select few utilities and drivers for next to nothing, some keyboard layouts, basic memory management and CDROM.
[semi-rant off]
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i love dos 
i learnt most of what i know on dos systems (then proceeded to forget most of it)
But i still love(d) dos
i learnt most of what i know on dos systems (then proceeded to forget most of it)
But i still love(d) dos
What a waste of time....:double
Pretty worthless give away but then that's MS
Pretty worthless give away but then that's MS
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Purely for historical interest then.
If it was MS-DOS v3 or after, there would be greater interest.
If it was MS-DOS v3 or after, there would be greater interest.
DOS 6 would have been nice, I remember how much I used to tweak my system to get the most out of that 640k whilst running free in the heady fields of XMS and EMS.
Was anyone else on here a fan of X Tree Gold?
Was anyone else on here a fan of X Tree Gold?
stephenfalken
Member
Lol I learned the foundations of my entire knowledge base from MS-DOS and even today still use the command line for some tasks on my Windows 8 PC.
For those who remember it, I ofter reminisce about how my 4MB of ram was split into Base memory, extended memory and the 'Conventional' memory being capped at 640k yet some games depended on almost every damn byte of it - so thank god for MemMaker! "Please wait while I reboot your pc 5 times and load stuff in different orders!"
Happy days!!
Sent from my Galaxy S4 using Tapatalk 2
For those who remember it, I ofter reminisce about how my 4MB of ram was split into Base memory, extended memory and the 'Conventional' memory being capped at 640k yet some games depended on almost every damn byte of it - so thank god for MemMaker! "Please wait while I reboot your pc 5 times and load stuff in different orders!"
Happy days!!
Sent from my Galaxy S4 using Tapatalk 2
Yeah Memmaker was a good option for trying to free up as much conventional memory as possible.
Retrograde
Member
Heh, I had like 8-9 tweaked startup configs, used QEMM which I think was the best memory manager, if nothing else because it let most programs incompatible with HIMEM or EMM386 work anyway.
It's quickboot was sweet too.
It's quickboot was sweet too.
