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Starting MS-DOS...

Practise you lot dream of CONFIG.SYS and detect yourself doodling "DOS=High,UMB" on scraps of paper during moments of boredom? If so, recent news from Microsoft volition likely make your 24-hour interval. Microsoft is re-open-sourcing MS-DOS on GitHub. As implied, this isn't the outset time the Bone has been released as an open-source projection, but co-ordinate to Microsoft, information technology's now much easier to use the data. The company writes, "Today, we're re-open-sourcing MS-DOS on GitHub. Why? Because it's much easier to observe, read, and refer to MS-DOS source files if they're in a GitHub repo than in the original downloadable compressed archive file."

Two unlike versions of DOS take been open-sourced — DOS ane.25 and DOS ii.0. DOS 1.25 was used every bit the ground for all of the non-IBM versions of DOS, while MS-DOS version ii.0 included a number of significant features such as IBM XT hard drive support (up to 32MB formatted), user-installable device drivers, not-multi-tasking child processes, and ANSI.SYS. DOS 2.0 was also the showtime version to support five.25-inch disks in capacities of 180KB and 360KB.

DOS-1

Microsoft's blog post notes:

  • All the source for MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 was written in 8086 assembly lawmaking
  • The source code for the initial release of 86-DOS dates from around Dec 29th 1980
  • The MS-DOS 1.25 lawmaking dates from around May ninth 1983, and is comprised of just 7 source files, including the original MS-DOS Command-Line shell – Control.ASM!
  • MS-DOS ii.0 dates from around Baronial 3rd 1983, and grew considerably in sophistication (and squad size), and is comprised of 100 .ASM files
  • At that place are some interesting documentation (.TXT, .Medico) files interspersed with the source and object files – many are well worth a read, as are many of the source code comments!

Microsoft's decision to open source MS-DOS like this might not seem particularly important, given the plethora of alternatives on the market. FreeDOS remains in active development, while utilities like DOSBox can emulate DOS effectively. So in that location'southward the fact that even as DOS versions get, MS-DOS ii.0 is ancient — I got started with MS-DOS 3.three in 1987, DOS 6.22 was the last version released at retail, and the terminal version to formally ship with Windows ME was eight.0. Simply DOS is also a critical component of the history of the PC and its evolution mirrors the deployment of features and technology in much of the market through the 1980s.

Microsoft asks that users refrain from Pull Requests that advise source file modification, as it intends to keep source files static.

Now Read: MS-DOS is 30 years onetime today, So, yesterday someone asked me 'What is DOS?, and Microsoft releases celebrated MS-DOS and Word source lawmaking to the public