Microsoft Open Sources Another Operating System

That makes me about 20 years older than you. If you’re right about the reasons for not open sourcing newer versions of MS-DOS, it makes me wonder why they don’t just strip the Windows stuff out; it’s not like it was necessary to run DOS programs.

How do you know they’re another Amiga fan? We’ll tell you. Shout out to the Archimedes too.

(I seem to remember that Australia imported the BBC Micro as well as having the home-grown MicroBee. Did they use the Archimedes, Down Under?)

oh yes, i used MS-DOS 1987 at work when i was a teenager, NCommander Utilities, word processors printing on a line-printer , LOTUS-123 spreadsheets, DBase II...
then in later years alongside Win95a to ME... handling config.sys & autoexec.bat for my work & private-life colleagues was the most fun, but the whole DOS scene was interesting.
mind you, my start was System-80 & BASIC (& machine code) , then Apple ][ (& 6502 assembly), so QDOS / DR-DOS / MS-DOS was a step up ;P

I'm certainly not the oldest here and used Ms DOS and a couple others as a kid. It wasn't bad until you wanted to use all of your limited RAM. It wasn't cumbersome until you realised your peripherals might not be supported by your software because most programs had explicitly support specific hardware. I could go on, but Linux is much nicer.

What would someone actually miss? Most tools that we liked have been recreated, often better, under Linux (mc is a great example). There's even an oss version of WordPerfect 5 for Linux.

I got into computers with my neighbors 286. I was in early elementry school when I got my first computer: a 386 SX 16 MHz. It was still the DOS era and pre-Windows 3, though in preparation for the upcoming Windows 3 I double the memory to the recommended 2 MB. I think the hard disk was 40 MBs. I remember DOS 3.3 and up, along with Windows 3 and up, though I think I skipped ME. Windows 3.0, 95, and 98 crashed nearly daily. While NT brought stability, I fondly remember the DOS and early Windows days as just being much more fun compared to XP and later.

Windows Server 2003 is source available :)

I can‘t talk to much about 7.0 but for 8.0 I can confidently day; it’s not special. it was purely just a bootloader for windows ME. it didn’t even have working EMS or XMS

DOS 5 onwards contain new utilities like memmaker and disk compression and MS was sued and I think lost some cases and had to pay for patents so might not be FLOSSable.

I was 19 in '88. My first version of DOS was 2.11 (Tandy 1000 HX) and I was using 3.3 through most of my college years. I think in college I may have been using IBMDOS 3.0 though. Most of the lab stations were OS 2.0.

I was not that old, I was 4 years old :D

Yeah i uesd MSDos since 6.2 and all the way to win98... I skipped ME

Brodie, the first version of MS DOS I remember using was 3.0. I was 24 when MS DOS 4.0 was released. Microsoft likely hasn't released code for 5.0 and 6.0 because some of the algorithms used by the included anti-virus and disk compression utilities may still be in use. Please note that I do NOT believe the actual code is being used, just that the algorithms have been re-coded.

Fun fact: while it's not officially released, there is Windows XP source code available on GitHub.

Not only legacy hardware - also to have hard real-time available in seemingly familiar setting for people to use in small PCs ;)

Hear me out. April fools 2025, in-depth review of the latest and greatest, Windows 2000.04 LTS

26 in '88. I didn't start actually working with or using DOS until version 4. I did "use" ms-dos 2 on a few machines on jobsites.
Those were the days of beating your head against the wall with drivers and memory managers just to get Aces over the Pacific or Wing Commander to run. Also the days of Hexen/Doom coop multiplayer and the added fun times of coax, barrel and T-connectors for LAN parties. :-D

Luckily I could always use something different than MS-DOS or any other MS-crap on my private computers. 😀

Why not DOS 5 or 6? 🤔

17 in 1988 here. First MS-DOS I used might have been 3.something, probably on a Tandon PCA20 (a PC-AT compatible with 20MB hard disk).

I was 16 in 1988

I was 46 in 1988. The first version of DOS I used was probably 2.0. I recall thinking that it was far inferior to Sinclair's QDOS (that's Tony Tebby's QDOS, not Patterson's).

And on the daily episode of Foss Gossip Beard, we are going to talk about ...MS Dos... o_O

you should do a video on drive space and double space; then again, might not be super exciting 😂

if they rather removed some of the suck from 11, I might get a tiny bit happy

another hypothesis - they want to milk the thing for longer. if they release everything now, it's once and done. but if they wait for a while, then release 5.0 and 6.0, and maybe when 95 is 30 years old they release the source code for it etc, they get way more publicity.

MS-DOS 4.0 was the first OS that Microsoft and IBM worked on to replace MS OS/2 1.x and IBM OS/2 1.x with a new OS. It was abandoned after a fallout

I used to be a DOS gamer. I remember when DOS 4 came out and upgrading to it.

You should cover Pcem, Brodie.

Yes I made use of it in late 80's.
Ran a bunch of AutoCad workstations running on top of MSDOS.
What fun, having to configure access to memory above 1MB.
Also having to configure drivers and IRQ's by hand.
Networking to Novell file server. RG58cu (thin-net) cabling.
Everything Plug & Play now - simples 😆.

The first computer I ever had was a hand me down from my grandpa running Windows ME, outside that never really used DOS.

The earliest dos version I remember is 5. I know I used earlier versions. 6.22 was like that last version that wasn't built into windows I think. I at least don't think you could buy dos 7+ they just were a part of windows 95 98 and ME. I played dos games and used batch files to make menus to make it easier to start my games. Like 1 for doom, 2 for commander keen, or something. I liked Windows 3.1 much more than Windows 95. My dad was kind of a pirate just coping floppies at work to bring stuff home, or descrambling cable channels.

I know this isn't a comment about the video, but did you do a video back when Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation and even if you did have your thoughts changed on it since then?

I think MS-DOS 4.0 was 10 years before Windows 98, let alone ME. I was actually born in 1988, so this is almost the same age as I am. So, that would have been 10 years before 98, and 12 years before ME.

My first MS-DOS was 2.x.

I still used DOS often when windows 3.1 was out. Had a menu configured to run DOS games and utils like midnight commander, I think I would start win 3.1 from terminal or the menu too

I'd love to see them release Win9X, because if there was ever an OS that is a royal PITA to run even in emulation it is Win9X. and I know someone will chime in with "emulator Y does it" but try running something like Mechwarrior 3 Pirate's Moon or the Vigilante 8 games and see how many game breaking bugs you find thanks to programmers back then coding for all the glitches and bare metal access they could to squeeze every drop of power from those old P2s and K6s.

I believe MS-DOS 6+ was a compatibility layer for NT 4 and later, not an operating system. The source undoubtably would give away how NTFS works. I would be shocked if it isn't still used for batch data processing in lots of corporations. It will never get released. Oddly everyone knows how NTFS works, not as good as ext.

I think I got into MS-DOS at v. 3.x: I remember people saying that v. 3.31 was really good. I honestly can't remember v. 4.0, because by that time we were working with a really good-character based shell (our work was writing). But v. 5.0 was good, because it came with a game of gorillas throwing explosive bananas at each on the Manhattan skyline. My wife and I whiled away some happy time at that: last game I played. I do now wonder if I could resuscitate some really ancient computers with MS-DOS and PC-Write, or even Wordstar.

I graduated high school in 1988. I was using a Commodore 128 and an Amiga.

MS-DOS' code is pretty damn well documented, making good for understanding x86 assembly. Likewise, several projects have gotten it to compile on FreeDOS and MS-DOS itself.

I have never seen DOS 4 in the wild, nor any of the other versions they've released, as it happens. My first DOS PC was an XT class my uncle was tossing out that was bundled with 3.3 on a floppy disk, and everything after that had already been upgraded to 5 or more commonly 6.22. I wonder if 4 represented the first and last actual jump in system requirements, possibly requiring installation to a hard drive, so anyone who could upgrade that far kept going.

Later version of Dos contained licensed third party code so if they do get source releases they will be an incomplete cleaned-up version missing bits. DOS 4 isn't too different from later versions, the only real things included later versions missing from 4.0 is Himen.sys and mscdex. Himem is where the links between dos and Windows starts. Licensed third party code is almost certainly the reason we won't see source releases of 16 bit Windows not because it is too similar to modern Windows. Win16 codebase would be completely useless for anything modern but would be nice for historic interest as it would reveal why a lot of Win32 is the way it is. Win32 is supposed to be source compatible with Win16 (it's really not) but there isn't really anything from 16 bit Windows that you'd want to use today. There is zero chance any 32 bit Windows would be open sourced, it really is just too close to modern Windows and would also have limited utility other than to cause problems for Microsoft. NT is NT and each version hasn't made big changes from the last.

they might not want to release 6x and up because of the shenanigans with novel and dr-dos. i know they added something in windows 3.x that would crash if it was installed on dr-dos. MS was sued by novel because of this and won. so maybe there is something in MSDOS 6x as well.

My earliest computer experience was being 5 years old playing the Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish games on my grandpa's IBM PC running Windows 3.1. I still keep a copy of Windows 3.1 installed in dosbox for the sake of nostalgia.

MS DOS 6 included Stacker. They probably don't want to open source code that wasn't theirs but just licensed.

was about two years into my software dev career in 1988 and first child born that year

I think you may not quite get how much of a wild-man's land programming was back then. "Copying code" was more a matter of standard than exception. Industry secrecy was more a matter of not getting sued for ALL the code you stole somewhere. The compiled code may look identical but that is because most things were (and actually are) more a matter of.. well. .Processors only worked one way. A lot of things were pretty much already a set standard just because it was algorithms that were open.. The compiled code MAY literally be identical just because you'd have to chose a foolish way to do things for it to look differently.. BUT!.. if you have the source-code you'll have stuff such as variable name, comments, etc, that can be used as evidence of the copying and pasting they did.. AND since this was from before the internet a LOT! of the copying and pasting were also in part a matter of illegal industry spionage (or more commonly that corporations have a joint adventure BUT get annoyed with each-other and break up and argue about who had the right to the codebase.. BUT of course both parties HAD the code base. .and.. may look at it for their own "versions".. I'd point to Windows Vs. OS/2 as a perfect example of this).....

So.. You have to wait until you can't get sued before you post incriminating code. (OR rewrite it, which would be a costly and non-rewarding endeavor)