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The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0

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Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0

#61

Post by codetrotter »

rnd0 wrote: post #55
themodelplumber wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd be really cool. Upgrades to QuickBasic would come out pretty fast I'll bet. In case it doesn't happen, I have to say FreeBASIC is pretty nice...I was happy with how easy it was to make a little simulation game and compile it. Also I haven't tried it out for very long, but Gambas seems pretty neat and does some kind of web app creation thing now too.

FreeBASIC is pretty cool, qb64 isn't bad either -and might be a shade closer to the original quickbasic? (I'm not sure as I don't know enough QB arcana to test). https://www.qb64.org/

There’s also a guy from Finland that wrote his own QuickBasic compiler and is doing some pretty cool videos on YouTube under the handle Bisqwit, with some of the videos talking about things he wrote or prototyped using QuickBasic.

https://bisqwit.iki.fi/source/qbc.html

https://youtu.be/TUa5HJUebEA

https://youtu.be/8x9Ya4izFaE

https://youtu.be/ZwcFV3KrnQA

https://youtu.be/5Da6ZyQJjE0

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL41889A5E9CBD68CF

Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0

#62

Post by philipkglass »

userbinator wrote: post #27
iguessthislldo wrote: post #24

It 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 a…

The second half of your post appears to imply that MS-DOS source releases would properly be dated "pre-Unix" (pre-1970), but they're not that old.

I didn't downvote.

Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0

#63

Post by codesnik »

userbinator wrote: post #27
iguessthislldo wrote: post #24

It 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 a…

I didn't downvote you, but what you say doesn't make much sense.

git is distributed and works offline, this means that nothing could prevent you from making commit with a "fake" date, you always can change time on your machine. So there's nothing really hackish in that, and that has nothing to do with format in which time stored in git internally. And you can have legitimate uses for "faking" commit date. I'd say repository above is an example of such a legitimate use.

Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0

#64

Post by timClicks »

userbinator wrote: post #26
giancarlostoro wrote: post #6

Wonder 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…

At this point, I think that it's probable.

I can see Microsoft using open source to attract developers & retain its userbase and platform dominance, then using that to make money from the surrounding ecosystem.

Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0

#65

Post by anticensor »

theamk wrote: post #53

Interesting, all sources of MS-DOS 1.25 is just 12K lines of code, including comments. Today, this seems like a pretty small project, and most commercial apps are significantly bigger.

This is the sanitised version, with inappropriate comments et al. removed.

Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0

#66

Post by forapurpose »

Don't overlook the email by v1.25 (and v2.0?) author Tim Paterson:

https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v1.25/Tim_Pa...

... or the version history in the v2.0 MSHEAD.ASM file:

https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/...

EDIT: Found better version history

Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0

#67

Post by kerng »

etatoby wrote: post #32
chungy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile :-)

Ohh, that screenshot brought back memories of Win 3.1 I remember developing real world apps using MS Access on Win 3.1. It was a great RAD platform, you didn't even had to know all of SQL and VB right away, you could add it bit by bit as needs arose. All the while I was learning C and C++ with the Borland compiler and playing around with Corel Draw. Fun times. I was in high school.

Oh, VB6 was the most productive language I have ever used I think. It really was about rapid development and getting stuff done by non experts, which was very powerful. Wonder if we'll see something like this again in upcoming years.

Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0

#68

Post by mthoms »

mdip wrote: post #25
milpool wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's been awhile but didn't TSR stand for Terminate and Stay Resident rather than Terminate and Stay Ready?

Your comment brought back some great memories, thanks :)

Re: The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0

#70

Post by stormbrew »

ndnxhs wrote: post #59
theamk wrote: post #53

Interesting, all sources of MS-DOS 1.25 is just 12K lines of code, including comments. Today, this seems like a pretty small project, and most commercial apps are significantly bigger.

My beta web app probably has more source code than that.. That has me thinking though. I have always wanted to try OS dev but all the stuff I have read says it will take years to get a system that can print hello world but surely it can't take that long to write 12k lines.

An "OS" that just boots and prints hello world would be on the order of tens to hundreds of lines depending how fancy you want to be and how much you want to lean on legacy bios support still being a thing.

There are a lot of tutorials out there that'll walk you through quite a bit more than that in a weekend.

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