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Open Sourcing DOS 4

hanselman.com

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Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#171

Post by macdice »

shanselman wrote: post #110
moody__ wrote: post #73

I appreciate the work in getting this open sourced but I find it telling that this had to be done through an outside motivator. There seems to be no internal "ticking clock" to get some of these things out in to the open. That's fine no one is owed the source code for this stuff or anything, but it would be nice if there was more interest on the side of the companies to get some of their formative history out so peop…

That's valid feedback. There is no clock, but there maybe should be. In this case, yes, Jeff and I had to PUSH. And that's a hassle. I'll ask around.

This is fantastic work, thanks. Hmm, what else... let's see... Xenix also really, really wants to be free! What a magnificent piece of forgotten computer history it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#173

Post by atlas_hugged »

shanselman wrote: post #134
_mlbt wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your hard work on open sourcing this! If you’re taking requests I’d love to see MS-DOS 5.0 or at least QBasic next.

Yep, I need to get 3.3 and then do 5, 6

Legend. Keep being the Bob Ross of IT. Love what you do. Thank you.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#174

Post by chucky »

moody__ wrote: post #73

I appreciate the work in getting this open sourced but I find it telling that this had to be done through an outside motivator. There seems to be no internal "ticking clock" to get some of these things out in to the open. That's fine no one is owed the source code for this stuff or anything, but it would be nice if there was more interest on the side of the companies to get some of their formative history out so peop…

It might not be a problem for DOS 4, but often the source code of software that was only ever meant to be published as closed source contains source code that was licensed from 3rd parties. This license may not allow publishing the source code.

Doing an investigation of what licensed software was used and possibly trying to get permission from the relevant rights holders (if you can even figure out who owns the rights so many years later) can be a big and expensive task, unfortunately. I understand why companies might not want to take that on (even though it sucks).

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#175

Post by pavlov »

When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC.

I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since I had replaced all the basic command names too — “dir” became “hak” and so on).

It’s pretty cool to see those strings again in src/MESSAGES.

At the same time, it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer is really theirs to modify. Modern operating systems don’t run binaries tampered with a hex editor. Most kids are on operating systems like iOS where they can’t even run a C compiler.

They can play with code in various sandboxes locally and on the web, but the computer fundamentally belongs to someone else today.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#176

Post by aquir »

ssklash wrote: post #147
conkeisterdoor wrote: post #72

It looks like "brain damaged" was the developer's go-to insult when frustrated :D 2024-04-25 19:35 ~/sort/dl/MS-DOS % grep -nri 'brain[ -]damage' . ./v4.0/src/DOS/STRIN.ASM:70:; Brain-damaged TP ignored ^F in case his BIOS did not flush the ./v4.0/src/DOS/PATH.ASM:24:; MZ 19 Jan 1983 Brain damaged applications rely on success ./v4.0/src/DOS/FCBIO.ASM:28:; MZ 15 Dec 1983 Brain damaged programs close FCBs multiple ./v4…

Super cool to see MZ initials, which are for Mark Zbikowski. They are still to this day at the beginning of every Windows executable/PE file.

What? Is this what MZ means? Fascinating!

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#177

Post by com2kid »

exe34 wrote: post #157
Stratoscope wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who recently asked our QA team to change the name of one of our test suites from "sanity test" to "quick test", maybe I can provide some perspective. Many software developers like me have faced challenges to our mental health. Indeed, there has been a time or two when I questioned my own sanity. And perhaps the sanity of some of my colleagues! It's not so much that there is something inherently wrong with…

I've struggled with mental illness all my life and have made several attempts to catch the bus. I'm diagnosed with several mental issues. Somehow I'm still not offended with the phrase "sanity check". What am I doing wrong? Is it possible to learn to get offended by this sort of thing? Will it make me happy?

Software engineering is a field full of neurodiverse people. Trying to police each other's language around mental health in a field where, at least historically, the majority of practitioners are going through some sort of mental health struggle, is borderline rude IMHO.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#178

Post by stepupmakeup »

pavlov wrote: post #175

When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC. I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since…

>Modern operating systems don’t run binaries tampered with a hex editor.

do you mean non-system ones?

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#179

Post by Zardoz84 »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #128
jmspring wrote: post #119

My brain is rusty, but I feel like MSDOS 5.11 was where things finally just worked. TSRs, memory managers, etc. Moving a lot and not being a packrat I've lost some of that history. It'd be interesting to see 5.x and 6.x released.

IIRC 6.22 was the pinnacle of MS-DOS, with all the comfort and niceties one could expect at the time. Then began the Windows era.

I had good memories of DR-DOS 5

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#180

Post by skissane »

chucky wrote: post #174
moody__ wrote: post #73

I appreciate the work in getting this open sourced but I find it telling that this had to be done through an outside motivator. There seems to be no internal "ticking clock" to get some of these things out in to the open. That's fine no one is owed the source code for this stuff or anything, but it would be nice if there was more interest on the side of the companies to get some of their formative history out so peop…

It might not be a problem for DOS 4, but often the source code of software that was only ever meant to be published as closed source contains source code that was licensed from 3rd parties. This license may not allow publishing the source code. Doing an investigation of what licensed software was used and possibly trying to get permission from the relevant rights holders (if you can even figure out who owns the right…

For DOS, I believe the core was only ever Microsoft or IBM. Some DOS versions bundled add-ons by third parties, but they are hardly essential for operation - e.g. MS-DOS 6 included DEFRAG and MSBACKUP (both licensed from Symantec) and MSAV (licensed from Central Point Software)

Similarly, with Windows, the third-party components are generally inessentials such as certain device drivers, games, some optional system components like the ZIP file support in Windows Explorer-you would still have a usable OS with these bits ripped out. Parts of NTVDM are third-party licensed, although I believe that’s mainly the software CPU emulator used on RISC platforms, I think x86 was mostly Microsoft’s own code

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