5 ms·

I appreciate the work in getting this open sourced but I find it telling that this had to be done through an outside motivator. There seems to be no internal "t

I appreciate the work in getting this open sourced but I find it telling that this had to be done through an outside motivator. There seems to be no internal "ticking clock" to get some of these things out in to the open. That's fine no one is owed the source code for this stuff or anything, but it would be nice if there was more interest on the side of the companies to get some of their formative history out so people can learn from it.

shanselman 2y ago
That's valid feedback. There is no clock, but there maybe should be. In this case, yes, Jeff and I had to PUSH. And that's a hassle. I'll ask around.
- _mlbt 2y ago
  I appreciate your hard work on open sourcing this! If you’re taking requests I’d love to see MS-DOS 5.0 or at least QBasic next.
  - shanselman 2y ago
    Yep, I need to get 3.3 and then do 5, 6
    - atlas_hugged 2y ago
      Legend. Keep being the Bob Ross of IT. Love what you do. Thank you.
    - justin66 2y ago
      Ironically those words capture how those of us who bought a computer with DOS 4.00 felt about it. :D But this is really great.
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    True, I don't know when Qbasic (and Edit?) went into dos (according to Wikipedia they were on 5.0)
    - _mlbt 2y ago
      DOS 5 was when I really got into computers. I spent hours pouring through the included manual learning all the shell commands and learning how to write .BAT files. Then I discovered QBasic and it changed everything.
- macdice 2y ago
  This is fantastic work, thanks. Hmm, what else... let's see... Xenix also really, really wants to be free! What a magnificent piece of forgotten computer history it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
  - justin66 2y ago
    That actually would be pretty wild.
- davidferguson 2y ago
  It's fantastic work you've done. As someone who works at a older software company (founded early 80s), I'm sad that there isn't a push internally for us to make our old software source available, or even just the binaries available! What sort of tactics did you use to convince them? Maybe I can apply them to where I work too...
- HeckFeck 2y ago
  Windows 95 OSR5 - Open Source Release. Someday soon?
NewsaHackO 2y ago
For some insight, look how people are combing for curse words/ devs making jokes about people being brain damaged etc. There is no upside for the company, and all that has to happen is some unsavory politically incorrect joke to get missed from sanitization and the are on the cancelled chopping block.
- userbinator 2y ago
  The "cancel" stuff only comes from a tiny minority of vocal extremists. Everyone else is entirely unfazed. Of all the things people here probably hate about the current "modern" Microsoft and its products, political incorrectness in decades-old code is far down the list or not even a consideration.
  - sumtechguy 2y ago
    It is about 'risk'. These companies are deeply afraid of being outed that way. They do not want to end up in court over something silly. Just remember a bottle of windex has the words 'do not drink' on it. 99.99% of people out there would not have done it but there is that small cadre of people who will do it and sue. Either for the power of it or for money. Do not underestimate the depths that fools will goto.
  - tonyarkles 2y ago
    Yeah… if folks are offended by some of the comments in the source code here they really aught to have a look at some of the other popular media from the era to contextualize what was considered acceptable at the time.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  No upside for the company? Do you not see all the people who are delighted to be able to browse the code?
  - ssdspoimdsjvv 2y ago
    No commercial upside for sure. Just some extra reputation points among a very niche group and maybe some happy employees.
chucky 2y ago
It might not be a problem for DOS 4, but often the source code of software that was only ever meant to be published as closed source contains source code that was licensed from 3rd parties. This license may not allow publishing the source code. Doing an investigation of what licensed software was used and possibly trying to get permission from the relevant rights holders (if you can even figure out who owns the rights so many years later) can be a big and expensive task, unfortunately. I understand why companies might not want to take that on (even though it sucks).
- skissane 2y ago
  For DOS, I believe the core was only ever Microsoft or IBM. Some DOS versions bundled add-ons by third parties, but they are hardly essential for operation - e.g. MS-DOS 6 included DEFRAG and MSBACKUP (both licensed from Symantec) and MSAV (licensed from Central Point Software) Similarly, with Windows, the third-party components are generally inessentials such as certain device drivers, games, some optional system components like the ZIP file support in Windows Explorer-you would still have a usable OS with these bits ripped out. Parts of NTVDM are third-party licensed, although I believe that’s mainly the software CPU emulator used on RISC platforms, I think x86 was mostly Microsoft’s own code
  - chucky 2y ago
    Yeah, but it's the "mostly" and "I think" that will cause lawyers to start sweating and force someone to do a bigger and more expensive investigation.
    - lproven 2y ago
      DOS is relatively speaking tiny and actually pretty modular. You can delete a handful of files, mostly binaries and some help files, and that's it, code gone. From the source it's a little different but there's little integration between the bits.
  - lproven 2y ago
    Agreed. From MS-DOS 6, remove the defrag, backup and antivirus programs, and DoubleSpace/DriveSpace, and that should I think cover all external code. If I remember correctly, it didn't include CD-ROM drivers, just MSCDEX to run on top of one... and the network stack was an optional extra. I'm not even 100% sure it includes a mouse driver as standard. IBM PC DOS 6.3, 7.0 and 7.1 include some additional IBM code: Rexx in place of QBASIC, the IBM E editor, but not much else.
nolongerthere 2y ago
It also sounds like the code didn't come from inside the house... I wonder how many versions of the raw code for these early OSes actually exist? Start ups are more concerned with survival and not archiving their code. Like how many people at their current company are putting in real effort to maintaining early versions of their existing code bases?
- jeffwilcox 2y ago
  The binaries for the multi-tasking bits did come from an external source; however, the source code is from our corp source code archives team. Even that was a bit less formal back then...
- miki123211 2y ago
  Most startups today probably preserve the vast majority of their code, due to how prolific git is. Companies that don't use monorepos may have a bit of a problem, if your stack is a mess of microservices, some of which you eventually retire, it's easy for that old code to get lost. Before the popularization of source control, things were different. A lot of people would just edit code Villy-nilly, only keeping very recent backups and the source for major versions, if that. There were no commits and hence no tags, so reproducing the code used to build a specific, minor version might be completely impossible. There were no branches, so ports and patches were often made by copying the code tree, doing some changes, compiling and then forgetting about the whole thing. It was entirely possible for a game studio to give their code over to another team or company, have them do a port and never actually care much for the ported code themselves. Then there's the problem of external components, most of which were licensed, third-party software, not open source libraries. Even now, they may technically still fall under copyright and be impossible to release.
shombaboor 2y ago
the workarounds because of technical constraints of the time make this stuff really interesting. When tech creativity shines

shanselman 2y ago

That's valid feedback. There is no clock, but there maybe should be. In this case, yes, Jeff and I had to PUSH. And that's a hassle. I'll ask around.

_mlbt 2y ago
I appreciate your hard work on open sourcing this! If you’re taking requests I’d love to see MS-DOS 5.0 or at least QBasic next.
- shanselman 2y ago
  Yep, I need to get 3.3 and then do 5, 6
  - atlas_hugged 2y ago
    Legend. Keep being the Bob Ross of IT. Love what you do. Thank you.
  - justin66 2y ago
    Ironically those words capture how those of us who bought a computer with DOS 4.00 felt about it. :D But this is really great.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  True, I don't know when Qbasic (and Edit?) went into dos (according to Wikipedia they were on 5.0)
  - _mlbt 2y ago
    DOS 5 was when I really got into computers. I spent hours pouring through the included manual learning all the shell commands and learning how to write .BAT files. Then I discovered QBasic and it changed everything.
macdice 2y ago
This is fantastic work, thanks. Hmm, what else... let's see... Xenix also really, really wants to be free! What a magnificent piece of forgotten computer history it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
- justin66 2y ago
  That actually would be pretty wild.
davidferguson 2y ago
It's fantastic work you've done. As someone who works at a older software company (founded early 80s), I'm sad that there isn't a push internally for us to make our old software source available, or even just the binaries available! What sort of tactics did you use to convince them? Maybe I can apply them to where I work too...
HeckFeck 2y ago
Windows 95 OSR5 - Open Source Release. Someday soon?

NewsaHackO 2y ago

For some insight, look how people are combing for curse words/ devs making jokes about people being brain damaged etc. There is no upside for the company, and all that has to happen is some unsavory politically incorrect joke to get missed from sanitization and the are on the cancelled chopping block.

userbinator 2y ago
The "cancel" stuff only comes from a tiny minority of vocal extremists. Everyone else is entirely unfazed. Of all the things people here probably hate about the current "modern" Microsoft and its products, political incorrectness in decades-old code is far down the list or not even a consideration.
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  It is about 'risk'. These companies are deeply afraid of being outed that way. They do not want to end up in court over something silly. Just remember a bottle of windex has the words 'do not drink' on it. 99.99% of people out there would not have done it but there is that small cadre of people who will do it and sue. Either for the power of it or for money. Do not underestimate the depths that fools will goto.
- tonyarkles 2y ago
  Yeah… if folks are offended by some of the comments in the source code here they really aught to have a look at some of the other popular media from the era to contextualize what was considered acceptable at the time.
saagarjha 2y ago
No upside for the company? Do you not see all the people who are delighted to be able to browse the code?
- ssdspoimdsjvv 2y ago
  No commercial upside for sure. Just some extra reputation points among a very niche group and maybe some happy employees.

chucky 2y ago

It might not be a problem for DOS 4, but often the source code of software that was only ever meant to be published as closed source contains source code that was licensed from 3rd parties. This license may not allow publishing the source code. Doing an investigation of what licensed software was used and possibly trying to get permission from the relevant rights holders (if you can even figure out who owns the rights so many years later) can be a big and expensive task, unfortunately. I understand why companies might not want to take that on (even though it sucks).

skissane 2y ago
For DOS, I believe the core was only ever Microsoft or IBM. Some DOS versions bundled add-ons by third parties, but they are hardly essential for operation - e.g. MS-DOS 6 included DEFRAG and MSBACKUP (both licensed from Symantec) and MSAV (licensed from Central Point Software) Similarly, with Windows, the third-party components are generally inessentials such as certain device drivers, games, some optional system components like the ZIP file support in Windows Explorer-you would still have a usable OS with these bits ripped out. Parts of NTVDM are third-party licensed, although I believe that’s mainly the software CPU emulator used on RISC platforms, I think x86 was mostly Microsoft’s own code
- chucky 2y ago
  Yeah, but it's the "mostly" and "I think" that will cause lawyers to start sweating and force someone to do a bigger and more expensive investigation.
  - lproven 2y ago
    DOS is relatively speaking tiny and actually pretty modular. You can delete a handful of files, mostly binaries and some help files, and that's it, code gone. From the source it's a little different but there's little integration between the bits.
- lproven 2y ago
  Agreed. From MS-DOS 6, remove the defrag, backup and antivirus programs, and DoubleSpace/DriveSpace, and that should I think cover all external code. If I remember correctly, it didn't include CD-ROM drivers, just MSCDEX to run on top of one... and the network stack was an optional extra. I'm not even 100% sure it includes a mouse driver as standard. IBM PC DOS 6.3, 7.0 and 7.1 include some additional IBM code: Rexx in place of QBASIC, the IBM E editor, but not much else.

nolongerthere 2y ago

It also sounds like the code didn't come from inside the house... I wonder how many versions of the raw code for these early OSes actually exist? Start ups are more concerned with survival and not archiving their code. Like how many people at their current company are putting in real effort to maintaining early versions of their existing code bases?

jeffwilcox 2y ago
The binaries for the multi-tasking bits did come from an external source; however, the source code is from our corp source code archives team. Even that was a bit less formal back then...
miki123211 2y ago
Most startups today probably preserve the vast majority of their code, due to how prolific git is. Companies that don't use monorepos may have a bit of a problem, if your stack is a mess of microservices, some of which you eventually retire, it's easy for that old code to get lost. Before the popularization of source control, things were different. A lot of people would just edit code Villy-nilly, only keeping very recent backups and the source for major versions, if that. There were no commits and hence no tags, so reproducing the code used to build a specific, minor version might be completely impossible. There were no branches, so ports and patches were often made by copying the code tree, doing some changes, compiling and then forgetting about the whole thing. It was entirely possible for a game studio to give their code over to another team or company, have them do a port and never actually care much for the ported code themselves. Then there's the problem of external components, most of which were licensed, third-party software, not open source libraries. Even now, they may technically still fall under copyright and be impossible to release.

shombaboor 2y ago

the workarounds because of technical constraints of the time make this stuff really interesting. When tech creativity shines