Shocking to think this is where PCs got started. On my first encounters with MS-DOS I was underwhelmed, the Acorn BBC Micro came with better software and it was all in ROM. I could not believe that this was serious software.
ADFS FTW
The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0
21–30 of 119 posts
Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0
#22Well it has a place, I suppose. For me: I wasted a lot of time and effort farting around with config.sys and autoexec.bat getting drivers to load etc. Could I sue for lifetime wasted?
Messing with SET BLASTER (port 220 IRQ 5 DMA 1) to get sound to work in "Rise of the Triad" was probably the defining moment of my early PC misadventures. That and making a boot disk for Dark Forces, and labelling it "boot dick" by accident (thanks for kicking me in the nuts, mum)
Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0
#23Why only 2.0, not 6.22?
If you don't mind doing some searching and the legality (or lack thereof), I believe the sources for 6.22 were leaked a long time ago along with 3.2 (or 3.3, can't remember now --- this was over a decade ago.)
Maybe MS will officially release it someday, but you'll probably see 3.x first.
Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0
#24It looks like they set the commit dates to match the release dates: https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/commits/master
Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0
#25Why only 2.0, not 6.22?
I'd prefer 3.0 - because it was the baseline to DOS applications, it seems. EverythingTM runs on DOS 3.0. (I'm using MS-DOS 5.0 on my 386, though.)
I'm with you there -- IIRC, the 3.x series was all about hard disks. I'd lean toward 3.31, though, personally as the "Everything(TM)" item since (I think) that was the version that shipped with FAT16 (had to hit up Wikipedia and this was the version that supported partitions over 32MB). I remember, as a kid, that we had to have 2 partitions on our drive because of the version of DOS not supporting partitions greater than that size and that this was a problem for us for a while (how long, not sure, I was young, could have been years but was probably months), so it seemed like it was a pain point that was overdue for where software was heading, even then[0].
It was also when I started to feel the age of the 8088 I was running it on and was the first version of an OS that I wrote something 'difficult' that I thought was 'really cool' using assembler. I was very young, so cool had a wildly different definition than it has today. What I wrote was a TSR (terminate and stay ready -- something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a background app) that made a ball-like character bounce around the screen after a random number of minutes, really fast* for a second (just long enough for you to maybe question what you saw)[1].
It was a horrible pain of C, some assembler, and -- of course the mess of pirated software that claimed to be something of a compiler and a development environment but I found most of them were designed to simply return indecipherable errors (or -- error codes -- sometimes literally just exit codes), it took me weeks, but it's the reason I stopped begging for a C64, Mac, Amiga or any of the other platforms that had far more fun things to do with them at the time.
[0] Some never forget being told '640K is more than you'll ever need' (yes, partial or misquote, but it's exactly what the guy who sold us that first 8088 told us) -- I'll never forget the incredible controversy that happened when OS/2 2.1 came out and it was something like ~30MB installed! We had a FULL height 350MB SCSI drive at the time (a cool $1,600 controller, cable, terminators, drive and all), so I was a little spoiled. I was still always almost full all the time but, hey, what can you do.
[1] I got the idea from a rumor I had heard about a software virus of the time that did something similar. Mine didn't spread -- it had to be edlin'ed into the AUTOEXEC.BAT. I named it something non-obvious since my dad was proficient enough to go snooping around (it may have even been something in the more l33t CONFIG.SYS).
Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0
#26Wonder if and when we will get closer to seeing existing windows apps open sourced. It looks like they may be doing clean up of old codebases to release
...or perhaps even Windows itself?
I'm a bit ambivalent about this (and all the "open sourcing" MS has been doing recently.) On the one hand, it's great to see source code. On the other hand, everything can be reverse-engineered anyway and it feels like this is a sign of a "shedding" (for lack of better term) MS --- one that doesn't see software as having intrinsic commercial value anymore, but instead is turning to services like Azure and stuffing telemetry in everything to eventually turn into another adware company for profit, while at the same time hiding that behind the "but we're open-source too" marketing.
Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0
#27It looks like they set the commit dates to match the release dates: https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/commits/master
Interesting. More explanation: https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-github-kind-of-12b08a46d0...
It looks like git uses the standard Unix epoch for its internal timestamp format, and not e.g. a format unable to represent dates before its creation, but that still means it can't really handle pre-Unix dates:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21787872/is-it-possible-...
Edit: downvoters, care to explain what I'm wrong about?
Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0
#28Full assembly. Was this the case all the way up to 6.22 ?
I believe I've once seen parts of some leaked DOS (6.0 5.0 or 3.0, I can't remember for sure) source code that was at least partially in C.
Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0
#29Why only 2.0, not 6.22?
I would love to see the sources of MS DOS 7.1 (the version included with Windows 98 that supports FAT32) actually. And Novel DOS 7 (that supports multitasking) if possible. Also these could make an amazing contribution to the FreeDOS project and possibly add some steam to what the world of DOS is nowadays. I love DOS.
Could you elaborate, do people love it nostalgically, or are they making a case for actual current day usage of some sort?
Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0
#30Why only 2.0, not 6.22?
I'd prefer 3.0 - because it was the baseline to DOS applications, it seems. EverythingTM runs on DOS 3.0. (I'm using MS-DOS 5.0 on my 386, though.)
3.3 seemed to be a common base for a long time, and a lot of people skipped 4.0. The big feature it brought to market was support for >32Mb disc partitions, but at the cost of using enough conventional memory that you needed bootdiscs to turn off "superfluous" stuff like mouse drivers to play some games.
5.0 brought the ability to load a bunch of stuff high, so you could finally have your cake and eat it too.