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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

#111

Post by JPLeRouzic »

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…

Windows research kernel was available for years for academics, but it seems it disappears somewhere in 2011/2012:

https://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/r...

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

#112

Post by ksec »

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…

I see Windows Kernel as a possible candidate. Or At least some sort of strategy based around having Open Kernel for Servers / Mobile, and expand .Net Toolset in Server Space as well as Gaming in Mobile.

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

#113

Post by rnd0 »

ksec wrote: post #112
userbinator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

I see Windows Kernel as a possible candidate. Or At least some sort of strategy based around having Open Kernel for Servers / Mobile, and expand .Net Toolset in Server Space as well as Gaming in Mobile.

I'd be pretty surprised. To be sure that there's no 3rd party crap in it they'd probably need to re-write it the way they rewrote their C# compiler which would be both pointless and difficult to justify (to put it mildly) from a business perspective.

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

#114

Post by JdeBP »

mdip wrote: post #35
unixhero wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you, when 6.22 has better tools and features?

I wasn't a fan of the 6.x series of DOS but I can't remember exactly why. I have fond memories of DOS 5.0, but that's also the first version I ran on my 486 that we built in the 90s (I came from an 8088, so this was an unfathomable upgrade). It was the first version of DOS that I could finally run some interesting games on. One thing I do recall about the 6.x series that drove me nuts was that the installer progress…

Only Microsoft employees are permitted that.

* http://jdebp.eu./Humour/microsoft-monopoly.html

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

#115

Post by mdip »

mthoms wrote: post #68
mdip wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

"Resident" is correct, and I am not :).

Honestly, I think I've always referred to it as Terminate and Stay Ready; probably something I read in one of those old books that used to adorn the bookshelf of my parent's office.

Writing it brought back a lot of memories, as well - glad someone enjoyed it! It's amazing to think that we used to write programs in ways other than "I don't know how to do this" (performs google search) "I know how to do this now", but rather had to pour through books, forums (on dial-up BBSes and what qualified as equivalents in the early Internet days) and acquiring that little nugget of knowledge felt like it had so much more value, even though the reality is that the value was the same, it just took a lot more effort.

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

#116

Post by kmeaw »

mycall wrote: post #37
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.)

3.31 was the best before the INTR purge in 4.0

What is the INTR?

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

#117

Post by wyoung2 »

jmspring wrote: post #41
qwerty456127 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd name "Farting around with config.sys and autoexec.bat" among the things I enjoyed the most in my life. That's a pity you can't find a job to be paid for this nowadays...

Once you started moving up the chain with Win3, etc, throw in config.ini and program.ini amongst others. So many painful memories or is that nostalgia.

> So many painful memories or is that nostalgia.

The Greek roots of “nostalgia” translate as “the pain of returning home,” so it’s a false dichotomy. :)

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nostalgia

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

#118

Post by rusk »

theclaw wrote: post #91
tinus_hn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The format Git uses determines the range of dates it can store. If it uses the normal Unix epoch system 0 means 1-1-1970 so you can’t represent dates before that.

I thought unix time was a signed integer, so you can go negative all the way back to 1901: $ perl -e 'print gmtime(-2147483648).""' Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901

It’s more a formality I think. Since recording of atomic time started in the early 1970s it’s accepted that an atomic second is an actual second back as far as 1970. No assertion of accuracy is made beyond that. Of course otherwise you can negative offset as much as you like beyond that but because of physics and stuff it can’t be treated with the same level of certainty or something.

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

#119

Post by rusk »

Theodores wrote: post #17

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.

If Cringley is to be believed, the original incarnation was called QDOS, Quick & Dirty DOS done up by some guy in the valley that didn’t want to pay for CP/M. Gates licensed it outright for $50k cause he needed something to go to IBM with ...
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