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posted by CoolHand on Monday October 01 2018, @05:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-late-than-never? dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 02 2018, @03:49AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Tuesday October 02 2018, @03:49AM (#742631) Homepage

    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?"

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