It isn’t a joke. Microsoft and IBM have united forces to open the 1988 MS-DOS 4.0 working system below the MIT License. As a result of? Effectively, why not?
As Scott Hanselman, vp of Microsoft’s developer group, and Jeff Wilcox, head of Microsoft Open Supply Applications Workplacestudies on Microsoft’s Open Supply Weblog, “a younger English researcher named Connor ‘Starfrost’ Hyde He lately corresponded with former Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie in regards to the relationship between DOS 4, multitasking DOS (MT-DOS), and what would turn out to be IBM and Microsoft. OS/2.
Additionally: Ubuntu 24.04: This nice new Linux distribution is just not solely quick, it is a energy
That prompted Hanselman and Wilcox to dig into Microsoft’s archives. The weblog publish continues: “Whereas they could not discover the total MT-DOS supply code, they did discover MS-DOS 4.00, which we launched in the present day, together with these further beta binaries, documentation PDFs, and disk pictures.” .
This isn’t the primary time that Microsoft has revealed the MS-DOS supply code. In 2014, Microsoft open supply MS-DOS supply code for variations 1.25 and a pair of.0 by way of the Pc Historical past Museum.
Different variations of DOS have additionally been open sourced through the years. PC-MOS/386, a multi-user MS-DOS clone from The Software program Hyperlink, based mostly in Norcross, GA, was open supply in 2017. It ran most traditional DOS and 386 purposes in protected mode.
In reality, it was a greater DOS working system than MS-DOS 4.0. For these of you who weren’t operating it in 1988, when The Cosby Present and Roseanne had been the most well-liked tv reveals in america and Joe Montanna was main the San Francisco 49ers to their third Tremendous Bowl victory, MS- DOS 4.0. It was a horrible working system.
Additionally: If all kernel bugs are safety bugs, how do you retain your Linux safe?
Horrible? Standard applications of the time, similar to WordPerfect 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3, and Doom, at all times crashed. You would be in the midst of a process and bang, your program would utterly freeze. Lengthy earlier than we knew and hated the Home windows Blue Display of Loss of life, MS-DOS 4.0 horrified PC customers.
This was primarily as a result of MS-DOS 4.0 used a whopping 92 KB of RAM. These days, you would not discover that a lot RAM being utilized in your watch. However again within the day, when 640K was what you bought on a high-end PC, it was an enormous deal. It used extra reminiscence than some other model of DOS earlier than or since.
PC customers both reverted to MS-DOS 3.3, which I really useful on the time, or moved on to DR-DOS by Digital Analysis 3.41.
How unhealthy was MS-DOS 4? The DR-DOS model numbers had begun by mimicking the MS-DOS model numbers to point out that the previous would work the identical because the latter. However DR-DOS 4.0 didn’t exist. As an alternative, Digital Analysis named its 1989 remake DR-DOS 5.0 to forestall anybody from considering it had any connection to MS-DOS 4.0.
Additionally: When Home windows 10 help runs out, you could have 5 choices however solely 2 are price contemplating
In reality, maybe one of many causes so many individuals had been prepared to strive a brand new Unix-like working system, Linux, in 1991 was that MS-DOS 4.0 had upset so many customers.
You may in the present day obtain MS-DOS 4.0 supply code and run it your self on an authentic IBM PC XT (certainly somebody nonetheless has one operating someplace), a more recent, open-source Pentium. PCem and 86box emulators. It may additionally work with Oracle Digital Field or the outdated Linux MS-DOS digital machine DOSEMUhowever I have not had an opportunity to examine it.