News Microsoft releases MS-DOS 4 source code on GitHub — 45 year old code now open-source

[Admin]

Microsoft has released the MS-DOS 4.00 source code, binaries, disk images, and documentation. The source code, which is nearly 45 years old, has been released under the MIT license, allowing tinkerers free rein.

Microsoft releases MS-DOS 4 source code on GitHub — 45 year old code now open-source : Read more

 

[domih]

Otherwise: https://freedos.org/

 

[ekio]

The OS that still drives the technical decision for Window 11…
Can we give up the stupid backslashes in the directories???
Can we give up the drive letters and get a mount point instead???

 

[georgebaker437]

A drastic change to software patents is needed. Out of support, out of patent...full stop, no lawsuits allowed. Manipulative changes to an OS should be grounds for losing ALL included patents and copyrights if provable in court.

 

[35below0]

The OS that still drives the technical decision for Window 11…
Can we give up the stupid backslashes in the directories???
Can we give up the drive letters and get a mount point instead???

Can i have File Explorer remember it's position and size? Please? It'll be my birthday soon.

Keep the backslashes and drive letters, just keep something previous Windowses had. Win 11 start menu is lovely. Please?

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

The OS that still drives the technical decision for Window 11…
Can we give up the stupid backslashes in the directories???
Can we give up the drive letters and get a mount point instead???

This will never change as long as backward compatibility is desired. So many, MANY things would break if you tried to change drive letters and backslash! We could just as well argue that Linux should switch everything from forward slash and mount locations (which also will never happen for the same reasons).

 

[USAFRet]

The OS that still drives the technical decision for Window 11…
Can we give up the stupid backslashes in the directories???
Can we give up the drive letters and get a mount point instead???

Thereby breaking thousands (millions?) of office level applications, all over the world.

For better or worse, legacy support is the rule with Windows.

 

[GustavoVanni]

How is it nearly 45 years old?
1988 was "only" 36 years ago...
MS-DOS 1.0 was released in August 1981, which is nearly 43 years ago.

Did I miss something?
Wait a minute...what year is it now? How long have I been asleep?

 

[P.Amini]

How is it nearly 45 years old?
1988 was "only" 36 years ago...
MS-DOS 1.0 was released in August 1981, which is nearly 43 years ago.

Did I miss something?
Wait a minute...what year is it now? How long have I been asleep?

Exactly!

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

How is it nearly 45 years old?
1988 was "only" 36 years ago...
MS-DOS 1.0 was released in August 1981, which is nearly 43 years ago.

Did I miss something?
Wait a minute...what year is it now? How long have I been asleep?

The referenced article notes that the original MS-DOS that was written almost entirely in ASM is nearly 45 years old, and our writer made an error that the editor didn't catch. I've corrected the text and headline now. Note that code released in 1981 was written before 1981, which is apparently where the 45 years comes from. At present, MS-DOS 4.00 is almost 36 years old, and probably parts of the code date back to earlier. But if memory serves, one of the variants of MS-DOS was a "from the ground up rewrite" and thus there's a break between version 1.00 and 4.00 somewhere.

I do remember that 4.x had some pretty massive changes relative to 3.30. Some of the changes were quite helpful for my budding computer nerd self in the 80s. LOL. I still write batch files to do a lot of stuff. But MS-DOS 5.0 was the one I recall has having some useful new functionality back in the day. Was that when himem.sys and emm386.exe came into being, or was that an earlier release? I had a great time trying to get games like Wing Commander and Ultima VII running by freeing up as much of the root 640K as possible. There was a big jump between 2.x and 3.x as well, which might have been the more important change. I don't think I ever personally used DOS 1.x, though.

 

[COLGeek]

Ultima VII destroyed my sleep cycle back in the day. Good times.

Oh yeah, DOS too.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Ultima VII destroyed my sleep cycle back in the day. Good times.

Oh yeah, DOS too.

Fun fact: I have over 10,000 benchmarks CSV files from just the past year or so on my GPU test PC. They're grouped by the year and month the testing was done. I have a GAWK script that parses the CSV files to give me average FPS, 1% low FPS, power, clocks, etc. But then I also have a simple .BAT script that takes a wildcard filename and searches for matches among all the sub-directories and spits out results.

@echo off
for /r %%x in (%1) do gawk -f csvfps.awk "%%x"

This let's me do stuff like ask for all the RTX 4090 results from a specific game to see how it has changed. So:

         V:\Benchmarks\Previous\01-Jan\Borderlands3 RTX 4090 Win11-23H2 (4) - AVG: 131.4   99pMIN: 101.5   99th: 109.2     MIN:  72.2     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5239.2   GPUCLK: 2738.8   GPUTemp:  70.3   GPUPWR: 451.5   GPU%:  98.8
            V:\Benchmarks\Previous\02-Feb\Borderlands3 RTX 4090 realone (4) - AVG: 131.0   99pMIN: 102.8   99th: 107.6     MIN:  80.8     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5154.1   GPUCLK: 2742.6   GPUTemp:  69.1   GPUPWR: 449.6   GPU%:  99.0
     V:\Benchmarks\Previous\03-Mar\Borderlands3 RTX 4090 realone retest (4) - AVG: 131.6   99pMIN: 102.1   99th: 107.7     MIN:  79.1     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5150.2   GPUCLK: 2737.1   GPUTemp:  70.6   GPUPWR: 454.5   GPU%:  99.0
      V:\Benchmarks\Previous\04-Apr\Borderlands3 RTX 4090 realone again (4) - AVG: 131.6   99pMIN: 101.9   99th: 107.7     MIN:  79.5     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5183.8   GPUCLK: 2737.6   GPUTemp:  70.6   GPUPWR: 457.2   GPU%:  99.0
               V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2022\12-Dec\Borderlands3 RTX 4090 (4) - AVG: 129.9   99pMIN: 102.5   99th: 107.1     MIN:  81.0     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5014.1   GPUCLK: 2744.5   GPUTemp:  69.3   GPUPWR: 436.2   GPU%:  98.9
           V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2023\01-Jan\Borderlands3 RTX 4090 PNY (4) - AVG: 129.0   99pMIN: 102.2   99th: 106.5     MIN:  83.0     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5215.1   GPUCLK: 2725.9   GPUTemp:  67.2   GPUPWR: 444.1   GPU%:  98.9
        V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2023\01-Jan\Borderlands3 RTX 4090 PNY OC (4) - AVG: 137.1   99pMIN: 109.7   99th: 113.4     MIN:  95.0     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5221.2   GPUCLK: 2888.4   GPUTemp:  59.4   GPUPWR: 449.6   GPU%:  99.0
         V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2023\03-Mar\Borderlands3 RTX 4090 NoVBS (4) - AVG: 130.1   99pMIN: 103.5   99th: 109.0     MIN:  74.6     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 4939.5   GPUCLK: 2743.0   GPUTemp:  69.8   GPUPWR: 444.8   GPU%:  98.9
    V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2023\03-Mar\Borderlands3 RTX 4090 NoVBSAgain (4) - AVG: 130.9   99pMIN: 107.1   99th: 109.4     MIN: 101.9     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5190.8   GPUCLK: 2743.1   GPUTemp:  69.3   GPUPWR: 447.7   GPU%:  99.0
        V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2023\03-Mar\Borderlands3 RTX 4090 retest (4) - AVG: 130.7   99pMIN: 102.6   99th: 108.2     MIN:  71.9     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 4951.5   GPUCLK: 2744.3   GPUTemp:  69.2   GPUPWR: 442.7   GPU%:  98.9
      V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2023\03-Mar\Borderlands3 RTX 4090 VBSAgain (4) - AVG: 128.5   99pMIN: 102.1   99th: 105.8     MIN:  90.0     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5211.2   GPUCLK: 2745.0   GPUTemp:  69.1   GPUPWR: 437.9   GPU%:  98.9

That's for 4K Badass settings in Borderlands 3. Thankfully, at least in that particular case, things have only fluctuated 1~2 percent over the past year or so. But check out Flight Simulator for 4K Ultra settings:

      V:\Benchmarks\Previous\01-Jan\FlightSimulator RTX 4090 Win11-23H2 (4) - AVG:  81.5   99pMIN:  69.6   99th:  72.1     MIN:  64.3     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5224.5   GPUCLK: 2745.0   GPUTemp:  67.2   GPUPWR: 381.3   GPU%:  86.9
         V:\Benchmarks\Previous\02-Feb\FlightSimulator RTX 4090 realone (4) - AVG:  82.9   99pMIN:  70.7   99th:  73.0     MIN:  62.7     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5196.2   GPUCLK: 2745.0   GPUTemp:  66.0   GPUPWR: 390.9   GPU%:  88.1
   V:\Benchmarks\Previous\04-Apr\FlightSimulator RTX 4090 realone again (4) - AVG:  82.9   99pMIN:  70.4   99th:  73.1     MIN:  63.6     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5205.4   GPUCLK: 2745.0   GPUTemp:  64.6   GPUPWR: 385.1   GPU%:  87.0
            V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2022\12-Dec\FlightSimulator RTX 4090 (4) - AVG:  81.6   99pMIN:  65.3   99th:  67.4     MIN:  63.0     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5106.1   GPUCLK: 2760.0   GPUTemp:  62.7   GPUPWR: 345.9   GPU%:  79.0
        V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2023\01-Jan\FlightSimulator RTX 4090 PNY (4) - AVG:  82.0   99pMIN:  63.6   99th:  66.5     MIN:  53.7     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5312.4   GPUCLK: 2730.0   GPUTemp:  64.4   GPUPWR: 378.1   GPU%:  86.3
     V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2023\01-Jan\FlightSimulator RTX 4090 PNY OC (4) - AVG:  83.9   99pMIN:  68.5   99th:  71.4     MIN:  56.0     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5325.7   GPUCLK: 2925.0   GPUTemp:  54.9   GPUPWR: 377.8   GPU%:  84.5
      V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2023\03-Mar\FlightSimulator RTX 4090 NoVBS (4) - AVG:  91.9   99pMIN:  75.4   99th:  80.9     MIN:  57.0     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5310.7   GPUCLK: 2745.0   GPUTemp:  62.9   GPUPWR: 396.1   GPU%:  94.4
     V:\Benchmarks\Previous\2023\05-May\FlightSimulator RTX 4090 retest (4) - AVG:  89.2   99pMIN:  73.4   99th:  77.7     MIN:  44.4     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5212.8   GPUCLK: 2745.0   GPUTemp:  64.1   GPUPWR: 388.7   GPU%:  91.6

I went from getting 91.9 fps back in March 2023 to the current 82.9 fps results in Feb/Apr 2024. I still don't know if that's due to changes in the game code or in Windows 11 itself.

TLDR: Batch files are fun. LOL

 

[DSzymborski]

A drastic change to software patents is needed. Out of support, out of patent...full stop, no lawsuits allowed. Manipulative changes to an OS should be grounds for losing ALL included patents and copyrights if provable in court.

In other words, you're proposing an absolute nightmare: a fundamental change in the concept of a patent in the US, a disaster given the bilateral treaties covering the subject, and for the last, a real definitional mess. Alice has caused a whole lot of uncertainty and disruption as the consequences have worked their way through the system, and you're basically pitching something a few orders of magnitude more significant.