I love that they specify that they’re not accepting pull requests.
Even funnier when it’s their own platform and it has been missing the feature to disable them for so long afaik
The MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0 files were originally shared at the Computer History Museum on March 25th, 2014 and are being (re)published in this repo to make them easier to find[.]
In 2014, MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 were released under a Microsoft shared-source license (Microsoft Research License) which forbids redistribution
In 2018, both versions were published to GitHub and relicensed as MIT, making them properly open-source
Today, MS-DOS 4.00 was added to that repo, also under MIT.
Oh.
Ignore them. Send a pull request with the full source of Arch Linux.
Nah, just a giant compiled binary blob. That’s what all the cool hackers do these days.
is archived
There is even a sentence in
README.mdthat makes it explicit:The source files in this repo are for historical reference and will be kept static, so please don’t send Pull Requests suggesting any modifications to the source files […]
Somebody fork it then?
Time to fork!
dumb question maybe, but where is the full source of arch Linux? My understanding is that its just vanilla Linux that uses the pacman package manager.
Am I wrong in saying the pacman is the Arch source? Or is there more going on in the tar ball?
Cheers! It looks like this is then the PKGBUILD
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/base/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD?ref_type=heads
In which case, there are no packages defined there which are Arch specific except pacman. So… pacman is the Arch source, right?
A lot of these packages have Arch-specific modifications. For example, filesystem doesn’t even have a non-Arch upstream as it defines the filesystem layout. That PKGBUILD and everything it depends on is the Arch source. Distributions are defined by which packages they include.
I guess we now have a timeframe in which to expect the release of Windows.
30+ years after death. Better than 70+ years of copyright 🤷
i remember writing .bat files and pretending they were really fancy update scripts when i was like ten they did nothing but it was still fun :)
Like half of my job is writing .bat files to automate stuff locally and not tell my boss that all I do anymore is double click the right things in the right order…
Next step, bind them to unused keys on your keyboard and press them in the right order
I suggest Autohotkey ;)
op’s job is now turning on the computer and setting off ahk.
i propose to create a menu in which you can define what batchfiles to run in what order. its been a while since i worked with batch files, but if memory serves right, that should be doable, no?
Do you ever list your job title as Batman?
No, because the IRS wants to tax Batman
only if they keep the it room as dark as possible and whenever someone walks in for help they jump up onto the desk with a flashlight and yell "I’M BATMAN’ while wearing a cape and underpants.
You can put in a timeout command at the end, and then call the next .bat file.
For example “TIMEOUT /T 60” waits for 60 seconds before resuming, or you can override it by pressing any key.
So if you know how long the wait time between scripts is, just write a master.bat and call them in order, with adequate waiting time in between.
They were important to boot games that needed most of your limited memory.
640k should be enough for anybody
tell that my mouse driver, the soundblaster driver and the cdrom driver fighting over every single byte of that precious ram 😩
Bill Gates denied saying this, by the way.
Or to play the demo made by the warez group that cracked it before launching the game.
I still use bat h files and the system scheduler to automate a shocking amount of my job.
Please use punctuation.
punctuation is a scam created by the shadow government
yeah punctuations is silly who cares
Typicalcommingfromashillforbigwhitespace!
It isn’t. There’s a reason for it.
FreeDos is better anyways
I wonder if this is of any use to them or if they’re already too far ahead.
To my knowledge, FreeDOS has been a fairly complete implementation of DOS for a very long time, so this is probably not useful to them.
Good question lmk if you find the answer. I just use FreeDos to play Chex quest
They couldn’t use it. MS DOS is released under a licence that restricts redistribution
It says here you can modify and distribute: https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/LICENSE
They changed it to MIT. You can basically do what you want with it.
LOL, some of the comments in the source are gold.
https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/DOS/ABORT.ASM
Note: We do need to explicitly close FCBs. Reasons are as follows: If we ; are running in the no-sharing no-network environment, we are simulating the ; 2.0 world and thus if the user doesn't close the file, that is his problem ; BUT... the cache remains in a state with garbage that may be reused by the ; next process. We scan the set and blast the ref counts of the FCBs we own. ; ; If sharing is loaded, then the following call to close process will ; correctly close all FCBs. We will then need to walk the list AFTER here. ; ; Finally, the following call to NET_Abort will cause an EOP to be sent to all ; known network resources. These resources are then responsible for cleaning ; up after this process. ; ; Sleazy, eh?~This is what people mean when they say hostile to users damn wow
Cool, but why’s that all of a sudden?
Laundering their reputation by open sourcing defunct historical code
Probably Microsoft is trying to “save” some of its reputation after adding ads to Windows 11 one more time
They found a new 0-day exploit
They probably only got clearance from their lawyers (or IBM’s lawyers) just now.
A lot of proprietary software includes bits from other proprietary software that they don’t have the rights to open-source. And untangling and removing those bits takes time and effort.
So cool, thanks. As a kid I spent so much time in DEBUG, stepping through DOS’s executables, and especially the Interrupt handlers. It’s so neat to see the actual source code-- way easier to read and follow. I didn’t know it was all written in assembly, from within Debug it sometimes seemed so messy and convoluted that I just assumed more was written in C.
What’s the use case that would upset Microsoft the most?
Idk, maybe fork it under the name MS-DOSNT
😆👏👍
Use it to program an functional DOS emulator for MacOS 8?
Woah MIT license. That’s a lot more permissive than I expected.
Take that FreeDOS!
6.22 or foff
Would this have Bill’s code in it ? Or was he off the shop floor by then ??
I’d be surprised if Windows 11 didn’t still have bill’s code in it
I’d be surprised if Bill had written anything substantial in decades tbh.
Both of these comments are probably true.
Windows is just shit piled on top of shit and sold as something new. It’s so bloated so they can maintain backwards compatibility. So original code is definitely in Windows 11.
His last product was the OS for the Tandy model 100 in 1983.
Did Gates write any code? Wasn’t he the marketing guy?
You’re thinking of Shit Jobs, the FruitCo charlatan. Gates’ pancake sort algorithm held the speed record for 30 years.
Is this useful for hobbyists besides poking around and seeking the design philosophy at work back then?
Like would there be any advantage or reason to implement this in a home project? For example maybe that it’s lightweight and has some rare compatibility or anything like that?
I think its interesting from a historical perspective.
I imagine people will examine the code, find easter eggs, bugs, unknown features, amusing comments etc.
I look forward to seeing what is found.
Looking forward to the “when I wrote this code, only god and I knew how it works. Now only god knows” comments.
There are a lot of decades old embedded systems out there. Every so often you hear about a big company still relying on floppy disks and other old tech, including major railways and airplane companies. Having the source code will help with debugging better than having to disassemble or other reverse engineering.
Maybe as a reference, if you want to build another abomination?
