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Earlier quoted context omitted.
are you privy to research in either of the organizations. I know its great to revere age old organizations but as we are speaking the best research is probably being conducted in a place we least expect. I am not privy to research at Ma Bell or only the published elements of Microsoft Research - so your reaction is more of an instinct than any factual basis.
Bell Lab's results are widely known. I'll just point to two: C and the Transistor, as being pretty hard to beat (there's much more). In any case, the parent commenters point wasn't the difference in the two research lab's results, but the difference in philosophies between the labs and their respective parent companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
are you privy to research in either of the organizations. I know its great to revere age old organizations but as we are speaking the best research is probably being conducted in a place we least expect. I am not privy to research at Ma Bell or only the published elements of Microsoft Research - so your reaction is more of an instinct than any factual basis.
Bell Lab's results are widely known. I'll just point to two: C and the Transistor, as being pretty hard to beat (there's much more). In any case, the parent commenters point wasn't the difference in the two research lab's results, but the difference in philosophies between the labs and their respective parent companies.
Another notable one is the original discovery of the cosmic microwave background, the primordial echo of the Big Bang, which is still being investigated today. That was a 1974 Nobel Prize.
A nice list is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_devel...
Basically, the GP comment is really quite wrong.
Under what license? Can we view, modify, redistribute? No one wants to get sued for these things, or being found to violate some end user license agreement with some other Microsoft software. On the other hand, I'd love to find out that people viewing this code contribute an improvement that no one in Microsoft saw in decades that helps them improve something today, leading them to soften their stance on Free Softwar…
The full license text is right on the download page: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-research-lice...
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Not only are you not allowed to distribute it by the license, actually distributing it would get you sued for patent violation. Using anything you find in the code will probably get you sued for patent violation, too. EDIT: I can just imagine a future lawsuit: A: Did you read the MS-DOS source code released by Microsoft on XX? We have logs to show you downloaded it. B: Yes, but that has nothing to do with this lawsui…
MS-DOS is maybe the ugliest operating system I ever had the displeasure of using. There's very little to learn from operating system design point of view in there, and better sources are available under more permissive licenses -- ie open source licenses. It looks like a PR stunt to me.
I understand your point, but in one important sense, this release has value. Someday, a scholar is going to write the history of drive letters and their perverse effect on all of computing -- up to the present day, where they're buried under a thin patina of respectability in the newest versions of Windows.
Under Windows, including the most recent versions, you can get repeatable results for procedures that involve peripherals only if you disconnect them all, then reconnect them in the same order each and every time. Why? Drive letters.
This might be excusable on historical grounds, except that, when MS-DOS was first written, there was already an OS without drive letters -- Unix.
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The full license text is right on the download page: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-research-lice...
Got a 503 on that link sadly.
Pretty cool. One question comes to mind, though: if I ever want to contribute to FreeDOS or LibreOffice should I refrain from reading this code?
Nop: this is too old so it's pretty much obsolete now
Not only from a historical perspective, but for future people who may need to run some ancient software in order to extract some ancient data from obsolete formats.
I sure wish Turtlebeach would open source the software on their Audiotron. They abandoned it maybe 10 years ago, but it's still far and away the best standalone media player, but it could seriously use a software update.