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Open Sourcing DOS 4

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Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#281

Post by tonyarkles »

userbinator wrote: post #135
NewsaHackO wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some insight, look how people are combing for curse words/ devs making jokes about people being brain damaged etc. There is no upside for the company, and all that has to happen is some unsavory politically incorrect joke to get missed from sanitization and the are on the cancelled chopping block.

The "cancel" stuff only comes from a tiny minority of vocal extremists. Everyone else is entirely unfazed. Of all the things people here probably hate about the current "modern" Microsoft and its products, political incorrectness in decades-old code is far down the list or not even a consideration.

Yeah… if folks are offended by some of the comments in the source code here they really aught to have a look at some of the other popular media from the era to contextualize what was considered acceptable at the time.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#282

Post by bombcar »

lproven wrote: post #233
bombcar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DOS 5.0 was peak perfection. 6.22 or whatever was just stupid double stack and other worthless garbage.

> stupid double stack DoubleSpace/DriveSpace? Mostly, you are absolutely right, yes. MS-DOS 5.0 was the peak, and then it started to acquire bloat as MS bundled stuff to compete with DR-DOS 6 and DR-DOS 7. But the thing is that by modern standards, the bloat is tiny. :-) I gave MS Office 97 a bad review at the time because it was several times bigger than Office 95, had virtually no new functionality, but introduced…

Bloat is partially the eye of the beholder, and 6.22 wasn't terribly large by any means, but the things it added were not incredibly stable and it showed.

It's also amazing how long things like DOC to DOCX took to really "take hold" in the industry at large. I still get DOC files now and then.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#283

Post by cesarb »

lproven wrote: post #230
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.

> My brain is rusty It is. Because: > but I feel like MSDOS 5.11 was where things finally just worked There was no MS-DOS 5.11. It went 4, 4.01, 5, 6, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22. IBM had a few extra versions as the divorce was occurring at the time.

> There was no MS-DOS 5.11.

There was Windows 3.11 which ran on top of MS-DOS 5.0, the two numbers probably got mixed in their memory.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#284

Post by sevensor »

Fond memories of DOS 4.0. We had an IBM PS/2 286 with a princely 30 MB hard drive. As a bored youth, I worked my way through the paper manual that came with it, running each command (in alphabetical order) up until I hit RESTORE (or was it RECOVER? Something like that.) It overwrote the hard drive with garbage, and that's how I learned about reinstalling the OS.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#285

Post by leeoniya »

smegger001 wrote: post #263
leeoniya wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

since 1984 no one was offended by it, but in 2024 it became offensive to insane people AFAIK "sanity check" doesnt even have a history like "retarded" (which actually became an offensive slur). maybe some folks just feel left out if they cant rage about and feel offended by something these days. ::eyeroll::

Usually its offended on someone elses behalf.

indeed

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#286

Post by _mlbt »

raverbashing wrote: post #204
_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.

True, I don't know when Qbasic (and Edit?) went into dos (according to Wikipedia they were on 5.0)

DOS 5 was when I really got into computers. I spent hours pouring through the included manual learning all the shell commands and learning how to write .BAT files. Then I discovered QBasic and it changed everything.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#287

Post by ok123456 »

acuozzo wrote: post #121
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…

> It's just that there are more descriptive and neutral terms available to us, so why not use them? "quick test" does not convey what is usually intended with "sanity test". The intention of the latter is to verify that a base set of assumptions hold true whereas "quick test" can be just about anything.

"quick test" would mean QuickCheck, property-based testing, to me.

Let's keep "sanity test".

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#288

Post by nolongerthere »

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 also sounds like the code didn't come from inside the house... I wonder how many versions of the raw code for these early OSes actually exist? Start ups are more concerned with survival and not archiving their code. Like how many people at their current company are putting in real effort to maintaining early versions of their existing code bases?

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#289

Post by einherjae »

grishka wrote: post #267
andsoitis wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I don't even need to know how to bypass it because it happens automatically behind the scenes. Nice.

But if you edit a binary with a hex editor, invalidating its signature, you would need to know how to bypass it.

Unlike your average user, if you have the knowledge to apply a hex editor, then you probably can Google how to work around the signature error.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#290

Post by wglb »

glhaynes wrote: post #107
blobbers wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's bring back those DOS 4.0 period sayings. Does this mean if you happen to be talking to BillG you could talk about brain damaged programs and he'd nod appreciatively?

It was BillG who famously called the 286 "brain damaged" after all. EDIT: Upon doing a web search, actually it looks like it was "brain dead".

He went the only one. Most of us did.
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