In March 2014, Microsoft released the source code to MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 via the Computer History Museum. The announcement also contains a brief history of how MS-DOS came to be for those new to the subject, and ends with many links to related articles and resources for those interested in learning more.
Today, we’re re-open-sourcing MS-DOS on GitHub. Why? Because it’s much easier to find, read, and refer to MS-DOS source files if they’re in a GitHub repo than in the original downloadable compressed archive file.
Good move.
Any theories on why the didn’t open source versions 3-6?
I suspect the might be quietly licensing dos to embedded device makers who can’t be bothered to update their software.
<cough>D in DOS</cough>
Disk. So?
FAT-16 and later.
the larger FAT file systems are pretty well understood at this point, I can’t imagine they’re trying to hide them. exFAT being the exception, but that wasn’t supported in any DOS release…
There are open source implementations of all of Microsoft’s file systems.
There may be some patent issues with exFAT but that definitely isn’t in DOS 6.
Note that they also changed the license to a restrictive “look, don’t touch” one to straight-up MIT.
That’s two to’s and no from.
Some yet to be discovered vulnerability might have made it to Windows 10 !
Unavoidable to note how Computing is a different phylosophy from Comm.
Prematurely mixing them was not good idea. Still isn’t.
I’m looking forward to the day when one of your posts will actually make sense.
As I noted, in this http://www.osnews.com/comments/30754 discussion his posts seem to kinda make sense…
Lost hopes, Soulbender. ID here as legacy bot.
Indeed…
This is indeed interesting, especially the notes, and the interface to Xenix, Having used both.
What I would include is the one bug fix that I had read about in TechPC magazine, about … not sure since it was 20+ years ago, was that there was a place in command.com where the CS was popped before the ES register, ( not sure of the details ), but after I patched it, I was able to run DOS for hours on end, while other developers had lockups. ( but extremely rarely ).
Perhaps some document could be added about the bug fix, and a bit of history about the versions:
Dos 1.1 was for floppies, and Dos 2.0 was introduced with the IBM XT for hard disk support, and real directories.
The source of Fgrep and Cipher are missing, as I do not recall them being part of the distribution. Fgrep would be incredibility useful, but I remember it as FIND.COM
Lastly to answer the question, “How do I build/Compile this?” It was not built or compiled. It written in Assembler, and must be assembled from assembler into object files, and linked. MASM was the Macro Assembler.
You could possibly use the DEBUG command with redirection to assemble it, but some formatting would be required, as it is formatted for MASM.
I remember writing the DEBUG script to make the ES/CS patch, and could run it for people that had intermittent crashes, that could fix that problem sometimes.
Thanks for the memories.
Exactly. Cross-Patenting of Hard Disk Tech. Still There.