this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 252 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I love that they specify that they're not accepting pull requests.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago

Even funnier when it's their own platform and it has been missing the feature to disable them for so long afaik

[–] [email protected] 147 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0 files were originally shared at the Computer History Museum on March 25th, 2014 and are being (re)published in this repo to make them easier to find[.]

[–] [email protected] 130 points 6 months ago

In 2014, MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 were released under a Microsoft shared-source license (Microsoft Research License) which forbids redistribution

In 2018, both versions were published to GitHub and relicensed as MIT, making them properly open-source

Today, MS-DOS 4.00 was added to that repo, also under MIT.

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[–] [email protected] 127 points 6 months ago (10 children)

Ignore them. Send a pull request with the full source of Arch Linux.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Nah, just a giant compiled binary blob. That's what all the cool hackers do these days.

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 6 months ago (1 children)

LOL, some of the comments in the source are gold.

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/DOS/ABORT.ASM

Note:  We do need to explicitly close FCBs.  Reasons are as follows:  If we
; are running in the no-sharing no-network environment, we are simulating the
; 2.0 world and thus if the user doesn't close the file, that is his problem
; BUT...  the cache remains in a state with garbage that may be reused by the
; next process.  We scan the set and blast the ref counts of the FCBs we own.
;
; If sharing is loaded, then the following call to close process will
; correctly close all FCBs.  We will then need to walk the list AFTER here.
;
; Finally, the following call to NET_Abort will cause an EOP to be sent to all
; known network resources.  These resources are then responsible for cleaning
; up after this process.
;
; Sleazy, eh?~
[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This is what people mean when they say hostile to users damn wow

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 6 months ago (8 children)

i remember writing .bat files and pretending they were really fancy update scripts when i was like ten they did nothing but it was still fun :)

[–] [email protected] 57 points 6 months ago (11 children)

Like half of my job is writing .bat files to automate stuff locally and not tell my boss that all I do anymore is double click the right things in the right order...

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (3 children)

You can put in a timeout command at the end, and then call the next .bat file.

For example "TIMEOUT /T 60" waits for 60 seconds before resuming, or you can override it by pressing any key.

So if you know how long the wait time between scripts is, just write a master.bat and call them in order, with adequate waiting time in between.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago

This guy is a master bat-er

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (8 children)

Next step, bind them to unused keys on your keyboard and press them in the right order

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

They were important to boot games that needed most of your limited memory.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (2 children)

640k should be enough for anybody

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I guess we now have a timeframe in which to expect the release of Windows.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 6 months ago

30+ years after death. Better than 70+ years of copyright 🤷

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 62 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (6 children)

I wonder if this is of any use to them or if they're already too far ahead.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago

To my knowledge, FreeDOS has been a fairly complete implementation of DOS for a very long time, so this is probably not useful to them.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 6 months ago

MS-DOS, Source public available on March 25 2014 with MS Research License, released with as Free Software MIT license in 2018, this yer released as Open Source MS-DOS 4.0. Anyway, the Source code was available since 2014, only different licenses since then.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 6 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago

Look at me, I AM FREE DOS now

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago (2 children)

What's the use case that would upset Microsoft the most?

[–] [email protected] 97 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Idk, maybe fork it under the name MS-DOSNT

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 6 months ago

So cool, thanks. As a kid I spent so much time in DEBUG, stepping through DOS's executables, and especially the Interrupt handlers. It's so neat to see the actual source code-- way easier to read and follow. I didn't know it was all written in assembly, from within Debug it sometimes seemed so messy and convoluted that I just assumed more was written in C.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Look at them, embracing open source like this, how wonderful.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 6 months ago

I'm sure the only reason why they waited this long is that they needed to make sure it's old enough that the companies they stole code from can't sue.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Can't wait for the OSS community to fork it and build some cool shit on top of this /s

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 6 months ago (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Where is the ctrl+alt+del function defined? I just want to see what made that sequence work. I'd also be interested in where ctrl+break is defined.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Ctrl+alt+delete was a separate interrupt line direct from the keyboard. That is, when you pressed the three keys, the interrupt signal was asserted, causing the CPU to jump to the interrupt service routine, which should be in the source code package.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago

Woah MIT license. That’s a lot more permissive than I expected.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

!remind 10 years when they will release the source code of Windows 3.0 for non-commercial use

(3.11 will take another 10 years)

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (7 children)

Wake me up when they open source Windows 10/11.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Would this have Bill’s code in it ? Or was he off the shop floor by then ??

[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (6 children)

I'd be surprised if Windows 11 didn't still have bill's code in it

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

How much you wanna bet that a select few turbo-nerds are racing to debug it or something.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

6.22 or foff

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/DOS/CTRLC.ASM
; The user has returned to us.
So ominous.
; Well... time to abort the user.
Goodbye

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Is this useful for hobbyists besides poking around and seeking the design philosophy at work back then?

Like would there be any advantage or reason to implement this in a home project? For example maybe that it's lightweight and has some rare compatibility or anything like that?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I think its interesting from a historical perspective.

I imagine people will examine the code, find easter eggs, bugs, unknown features, amusing comments etc.

I look forward to seeing what is found.

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