It appears to be missing the code for DOSSHELL — the only references I see to SHELLB or SHELLC are in the SELECT (installer) source code.
Open Sourcing DOS 4
321–330 of 382 posts
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#322Things were a simpler time, but information was MUCH less accessible. In the 90s it was magazines, BBSs, and user groups. The information access we have today is orders upon orders of magnitudes more. Kids today have a limitless and open door to information to hack. Yes, Apple and MS might be more closed, but there are many other OSs.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#323When 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…
We can still give DOS to kids though. I'm going to try it out when he reaches 6.
Occasionally I allow my (toddler/preschool) kids to play 'Kindercomp' in DOSbox on my computer. It's got a mode that prints the letters you type across the screen in different colors, which seems to be the fan favorite because it rewards indiscriminate keyboard mashing.
When they get a little older I plan to introduce QBASIC programs that do the same kind of thing, then we can start looking at the code that makes it do that.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#324When will Windows NT 3.51 be open sourced? Windows 7?
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#325I'm not sure but I feel like I can remember DOS 6.22, 6.0 or 3.0 (I'm not sure) source code leaked some year near 2000.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#326When 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…
The DOS era was a bit before my time; I had a C64 as a kid but I managed to break it before I got to do too much fun [1]. That said, I got into web dev when I was a pretty young kid, about 9 years old, and I would have fun hacking together different websites. Eventually I noticed the “edit” button on top of the browser and learned you could mess with other people’s sites as well. I had lots of fun breaking stuff. Com…
The C64 breaking was almost certainly not your fault.. they had a bunch of commonly occurring faults, and a number of the chips, especially those which commodore fabbed themselves were notorious for giving up eventually. The PLA failing was a particularly common occurrence, but RAM and other glue logic sometimes fails too. These days there's a vibrant hobbyist community and a lot of the chips have modern replacements available. I'm still grateful for having grown up with a C64, it was a fun way to learn the ropes.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#327When 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…
> 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. Kids with a hacker mentality (let's face it, even in the 80s those of us who hacked around with DOS etc. were the teeny tiny minority) have more options than ever before, including but not limited to FreeDOS, Linux, or a bunch of others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-sour…
You said the magic keyword: "curiosity", when it comes to computers and tech at least. Something that I find severely lacking among - for lack of a better term - Gen Z.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of for a very long while. You then had a descendant SFU from some SP of NT4 to XP / Server 2003, then a further one SUA until Windows 8 / Server 2012. With some code flowing between various companies. I think SFU still used the Posix NT subsystem core. Probably also SUA, although I'm less sure. Not really the case WSL1, though (although probably the core NT kernel was more ready to support it, thanks to its hist…
I knew about SFU, Services For Unix. What was SUA?
Subsystem for Unix-based Applications also known as "Interix"
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#329https://www.os2museum.com/wp/how-not-to-release-historic-sou...
Git does not tamper with file encoding. Only way file content modification can happen is automatic CRLF conversion, but that’s a local setting, not affecting the public archive, unless .gitattributes is present, not the case here. It is common sense that one should never enable this setting globally on your system, precisely because it can tamper with content unexpectedly.
Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4
#330I 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?
Most startups today probably preserve the vast majority of their code, due to how prolific git is. Companies that don't use monorepos may have a bit of a problem, if your stack is a mess of microservices, some of which you eventually retire, it's easy for that old code to get lost.
Before the popularization of source control, things were different. A lot of people would just edit code Villy-nilly, only keeping very recent backups and the source for major versions, if that. There were no commits and hence no tags, so reproducing the code used to build a specific, minor version might be completely impossible. There were no branches, so ports and patches were often made by copying the code tree, doing some changes, compiling and then forgetting about the whole thing. It was entirely possible for a game studio to give their code over to another team or company, have them do a port and never actually care much for the ported code themselves.
Then there's the problem of external components, most of which were licensed, third-party software, not open source libraries. Even now, they may technically still fall under copyright and be impossible to release.