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Open Sourcing DOS 4

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Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#311

Post by redeeman »

WalterBright wrote: post #300
Stratoscope wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walter, you and I have known each other for a long time. Not in person; we've never met. But through our interactions here on HN. I have a lot of respect for you and for everything you have accomplished. So I have to ask you directly: Is being "boring" or not the way we should decide how to express ourselves? Regarding a "quick test" vs. a "sanity test". Instead of judging this on what is "boring", why can't we make…

I like to play with language. English has a million words in it. Why not use it? And why stop there, I insert words from other languages, play with the spelling, use bad puns, allusions to movie dialog, whatever crosses my mind. I hope the readers/listeners would find it fun, too. If they mine what I write for an insult, that's on them. I'm not interested in people looking for an insult, or people who get offended on…

unfortunately your ideals isnt compatible with the ongoing epidemic of oppression olympics.

add trigger warnings!!!! (im joking)

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#312

Post by shudza »

zooq_ai wrote: post #215
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…

My favorite Hex Editor hack was when I cracked a Windows software simply by changing the instruction "Equal to" to "Not Equal to" where it matches for Software Key with user entered key.

It was something like: find "74", change it to "75" lol

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#313

Post by redeeman »

Stratoscope wrote: post #101
steelbrain wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, I missed the bus on this one. What's wrong with "sanity check"?

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…

without knowing what the test did, quick test in no way conveys the same information. Honestly, did you really need to ask them to do that? please dont be that guy on the team (sorry, meant please dont be "that working set of hands on the team" (hope this illustrates the point somewhat))

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#314

Post by jeffwilcox »

nolongerthere wrote: post #288
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?

The binaries for the multi-tasking bits did come from an external source; however, the source code is from our corp source code archives team. Even that was a bit less formal back then...

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#315

Post by jeffwilcox »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #280
garaetjjte wrote: post #278

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/how-not-to-release-historic-sou...

This is important. If we're really trying to open source and preserve DOS, we need a better system. Someone at MS needs to create museuem.github.com and allow us to browse everything just as it was preserved on disk.

I think it's a mix. We're learning a bit each time. I'm bummed in the rush to get this finally published we made a few errors. We first found what looked like the source back in September last year.

Having the source on GitHub feels like a nice way for some people to peek through it... but there's clear compromise between archival and sharing some source.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#316

Post by davidgnz »

snvzz wrote: post #136
davidgnz wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DR-DOS hasn't been open sourced. Caldera did release the source for the kernel and a few other bits, but the license only allowed free use for evaluation purposes. After 90 days (for a company) or "a reasonable period" for non-commercial entities you were required to buy a license. Bryan Sparks did open-source CP/M a little while back, but AFAIK he hasn't said anything about DR-DOS so far.

There was an actual open source version, which was retracted[0]. Fortunately for the commons, what's done is done. 0. https://archiveos.org/drdos/

Thats the DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project. Its a set of patches for the Caldera OpenDOS 7.01 kernel.

The license file inside the original Caldera OpenDOS 7.01 source archive says:

"Caldera grants you a non-exclusive license to use the Software in source or binary form free of charge if (a) you are a student, faculty member or staff member of an educational institution (K-12, junior college, college or library), a staff member of a religious organization, or an employee of an organization which meets Caldera's criteria for a charitable non-profit organization; or (b) your use of the Software is for the purpose of evaluating whether to purchase an ongoing license to the Software. The evaluation period for use by or on behalf of a commercial entity is limited to 90 days; evaluation use by others is not subject to this 90 day limit but is still limited to a reasonable period."

So that website is incorrect when it says OpenDOS was released under an open-source license. Not surprising though - most websites discussing OpenDOS make this error. Possibly because at the time I believe Caldera did actually talk about open-sourcing DR-DOS, they just failed to to actually follow through.

If he still has the source code, whats needed is for Bryan Sparks to release it under some regular open-source license like Microsoft have done here.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#317

Post by latentsea »

elwell wrote: post #155
randomdata wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cancelled() makes it seem as if PHP is a sexual predator – which may be the case, but as a matter of course... How about goodbye()?

goodbye() could offend someone whose father "went out to get a pack of smokes" and never came back

Ok, let's change it to fetchmilk()

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#318

Post by tambourine_man »

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…

Many replies here argue that there are plenty of choices today for the hacker-inclined, many more than 40 years ago, which is true, of course.

But I think what your post implies is that regular computers back then invited you to hack them. It might have awoken a curiosity that could have otherwise remained latent in many of us.

A anecdote from the other side of the fence: Apple used to ship an app called ResEdit whose sole purpose was for you to hack with your Mac. Change strings, menu shortcuts, images, sounds. I had my own localized and rebranded version of Eudora and many tiny modifications to games. Can you imagine a first party hacking tool like that today from the fruit company?

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#319

Post by tambourine_man »

tambourine_man wrote: post #318
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…

Many replies here argue that there are plenty of choices today for the hacker-inclined, many more than 40 years ago, which is true, of course. But I think what your post implies is that regular computers back then invited you to hack them. It might have awoken a curiosity that could have otherwise remained latent in many of us. A anecdote from the other side of the fence: Apple used to ship an app called ResEdit whos…

I just remembered replacing the Netscape “N” comete with my own GIF. How cool was that?

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#320

Post by Lightkey »

chx wrote: post #29
_mlbt wrote: post #4

Holy cow, this is huge! DOS 1.x and 2.x are too old to run a lot of vintage DOS software, but 4.x would run just about everything.

No, you are thinking of 4.01 this is 4.0. Those are very different operating systems, this is DOS 3.2 + later abandoned very crude multitasking features. Roughly. And this matters because DOS 3.3 was a milestone. 4.01 comes from 4.00 which has nothing to do with 4.0 (yay for versions).

Like ComputerGuru said, even the README of the repository mentions both 4.0 and 4.00 as if they are the same.
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