This is no joke. There are Microsoft and IBM allied forces Open Source for MS-DOS 4.0 1988 Licensed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Why? Well, why not?
Such as Scott Hanselman, Microsoft’s vice president of developer communities, and division president Jeff Wilcox Microsoft Office for open source software“A young English researcher named Connor “Star Frost” Hyde I recently corresponded with former Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzy about the relationship between DOS 4 and multitasking DOS (MT-DOS) and what would later become IBM and Microsoft. Operating System/2.
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This led Hanselman and Wilcox to search the Microsoft archives. The blog post continues: “Although they couldn’t find the complete source code for MT-DOS, they did find MS-DOS 4.00, which we’re releasing today, along with additional beta binaries, documentation PDFs, and disk images.”
This is not the first time that Microsoft has released MS-DOS source code. In 2014, Microsoft Open source MS-DOS source code For versions 1.25 and 2.0 via the Computer History Museum.
Other versions of DOS have also been open source over the years. PC-MOS/386, a multi-user MS-DOS clone from Norcross, GA based Software Link, was open sourced in 2017. It runs most standard DOS and 386 protected mode applications.
In fact, DOS was a better operating system than MS-DOS 4.0. For those of you who weren’t running it in 1988 – when The Cosby Show and Roseanne were the two most popular television shows in the US and Joe Montana was leading the San Francisco 49ers to their third Super Bowl win – MS-DOS 4.0 was a terrible operating system.
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What is the danger? Currently popular programs such as WordPerfect 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3 and Doom always crash. You are in the middle of a task and your program completely freezes. Long before the Windows Blue Screen of Death became known and hated, MS-DOS 4.0 PC users were terrified.
This is mainly because MS-DOS 4.0 used a massive 92KB of RAM. These days, you won’t notice that your watch is using a lot of RAM. But when you had 640K on a high-end PC, it was a big deal. It used more memory than any other DOS version before or since.
PC users either reverted to MS-DOS 3.3, which I recommended at the time, or switched to DR-DOS Digital Research 3.41.
How bad is MS-DOS 4? DR-DOS version numbers began to mimic MS-DOS version numbers to show that the former would work the same as the latter. But there was no DR-DOS 4.0. Instead, Digital Research called the 1989 remake DR-DOS 5.0 so that no one would think it had any connection to MS-DOS 4.0.
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In fact, one of the reasons many people were willing to use a new Unix-like operating system, Linux, in 1991 was that MS-DOS 4.0 angered many users.
Today you can Download the MS-DOS 4.0 source code And run it yourself on an original IBM PC XT (somebody has to do one somewhere), with a new Pentium machine and open source pc And 86 boxes Simulators can do this too Oracle VirtualBox Or an old Linux MS-DOS virtual machine the twelfthBut I didn’t get a chance to see it.