retrocomputing

4434 readers

9 users here now

Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

SDF

cognitivegears

Penkster

121

Microsoft releases MS-DOS 4 source code on GitHub — 45 year old code now open-source (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 10 months ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to c/retrocomputing

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

top 8 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 24 points 10 months ago (2 children)

But not 5.0 yet - they still got critical proprietary stuff in EDIT and SMARTDRV.SYS that they don’t want their competitors to get a hold of.

[–] IonicFrog 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I wonder if they licensed the source of 5.0+ to someone and are still getting paid for it. If so, it's probably something ubiquitous and critical that nobody would think of like traffic lights or water treatment plants.

[–] CatTrickery@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 10 months ago

I think that is likely since 3.3 wasn't included either and that is one of those versions people stuck with for ages.

[–] xyzzy@lemm.ee 4 points 10 months ago

According to people who are way more interested in this than I am, there was a bunch of licensed software in 5 and 6.

[–] 486@kbin.social 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Did anyone manage to build this? It seems something is missing, or I am doing something wrong. The build fails due to missing symbols for me. Also, interestingly the assembler complained about one line in a certain file being too long. Fortunately that lines was just a comment, so it was easy to fix that.

[–] 486@kbin.social 11 points 10 months ago

This explains it, although it is not really Git's fault as that article suggests, but rather the charset conversions to UTF-8 that broke things. With all that fixed it builds fine. I've been using DOSBOX and since all the required build tools are included in the repo, it is easy to build.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 4 points 10 months ago

I wonder if FreeDOS will find this release useful at all.

[–] Nisaea 2 points 10 months ago

And they spectacularly fucked up the release. Doesn't compile, and they hurriedly edited stuff including comments calling the original DOS creator "brain-dead".