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posted by
LaminatorX
on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:04AM
from the 640k-ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody dept.
from the 640k-ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody dept.
Lagg and Uncle_Al both wrote in about this surprising source release.
Lagg writes:
Today a technet article was posted by a Microsoft employee announcing that they are releasing to the Computer History Museum and the public at large the source code to v1.1 and 2.0 of MS-DOS as well as v1.1a of Word. All obvious jokes aside this could be good for projects such as DOSBox. Note also that said employee considers 300kb to be small for source code. Seems rather large to me, even now. But in any case this will be an interesting thing to dig into. To save the trouble of link chasing here are the relevant links:
Computer history article for MS-DOS (direct link to source)
Computer history article for Word (direct link to source)
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Microsoft Releases MSDOS 2 and WFW 1 Sources
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ls671 on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:57AM
MS-DOS and IBM-DOS were really easy to reverse engineer with a debugger. I had a lot of fun hacking it back then along with developing my own TSR programs. Peter Norton books were insightful.
So, I would say, what in this makes available something that wasn't already reverse-engineered and widely available?
Source code? Back then, most of it was written in pure assembly language making it easier to reverse-engineer and thus reproduce the source code if you wanted to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norton [wikipedia.org]
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Wednesday March 26 2014, @10:25PM
As I mention above, the MSDOS5 source was leaked years ago. And yeah, it was mostly ASM. Its comments included some entertaining, ah, personnel evaluations regarding IBM's programmers. :)
People like to bitch and moan about it, but MSDOS5/6/7 itself was utterly stable. If you ran shit software (which was abundant then as now), well, yeah, that could crash DOS. But my DOS setup, which worked its little digital ass off, typically ran a couple years between reboots. My DOS7 game box still does.