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

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 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".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 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.