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Microsoft Releases Crown Jewels — From 1982!
If you look back 30 or so years ago, it wasn’t clear what was going to happen with personal computers. One thing most people would have bet on, though, was that CP/M — the operating system from Digital Research — would keep growing and power whatever new machines were available. Except it didn’t. MS-DOS took over the word and led — eventually — to the huge number of Windows computers we know today. Microsoft has released the source code to MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 on GitHub.
Microsoft — then another fledgling computer company — had written some BASIC interpreters and wanted in on the operating system space. They paid the princely sum of $75,000 to Seattle Computer Products for something called QDOS written by [Tim Paterson]. Rebranded as MS-DOS, the first version appeared in late 1981 and version 1.25 was out about a year later.
While you might not think having MS-DOS source code is a big deal, there’s still a lot of life left in DOS and it is also interesting from an educational and historical perspective. If you don’t want to read x86 assembly language, there’s also the BASIC source for the samples (paradoxically, in the bin subdirectory) along with compiled COM files for old friends like EDLIN and DEBUG.
[...] If this gets you wanting to write some new DOS programs, you can actually use GCC now. Or if you want to play the DONKEY.BAS file, QB64 would probably work.
Also at The Register.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 01 2018, @07:25PM (2 children)
There's no hint in this little write-up how cutthroat Microsoft was. If Bill Gates could do you dirty, he was going to do it. I really dislike any stories that cast Microsoft as "another fledgling computer company". Digital Research was among those screwed over by MS. Unlike IBM, DR wasn't so huge that they could work around MS, and move on.
http://www.thefullwiki.org/Windows_3.2#wikipedia_Win32s [thefullwiki.org]
http://www.thefullwiki.org/Windows_3.2#wikipedia_DR_DOS_compatibility [thefullwiki.org]
Note that "later settled" doesn't mean that "everything was made right". It was dirty, and it was typical Bill Gates.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday October 02 2018, @12:26AM (1 child)
Yeah, i remember hearing "You COULD use DR-DOS and it COULD maybe work with MS products, but if you DO happen to lose any files or something goes wrong......."
Of course that open-ended statement meant "Why not just use MS-DOS?"
And, of course, if MS-DOS DID happen to lose any of your files or something went wrong.....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 02 2018, @03:49AM
I ran Win3.11 atop DRDOS7 for some years, and later ran a weird hybrid (MSDOS boot files, DRDOS memory manager -- DRDOS stuff ran about 20% slower, but had some useful options). Everything got along famously, and Windows *never* crashed. The only point of failure was actually an issue with MSOffice for Win3.1, which on DRDOS needed a goofy FILES=NN setting to work, and that was due to its fixed belief that the world had never progressed past DOS4 (with its file handles bug) . And to this day... here we are on WinXP, let's see what it has to say:
C:\> SETVER
WINWORD.EXE 4.10
EXCEL.EXE 4.10
METRO.EXE 3.31
DD.EXE 4.01
DD.BIN 4.01
LL3.EXE 4.01
After using both for many years in all sorts of situations... all else being equal, MSDOS performs better, is more stable, and has fewer bugs; DRDOS's memory manager has more features (it's sort of a halfassed implementation of DOS4GW) but is also more cranky, and was seldom worth the bother. So, yeah... my eventual conclusion was, "Why not just run MSDOS?"
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.