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Author Topic: News You missed; Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS .  (Read 8674 times)

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Geek-9pm

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News You missed; Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS .
« on: December 21, 2018, 11:40:44 AM »
This is from October 2018.

Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS source from the museum...

As Microsoft gears up to unleash the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, Rich Turner, guardian of the command line at Redmond, took a moment to remind us of simpler, MS-DOS-based times.
After original author Tim Paterson found the source for MS-DOS 1.25 (along with a six-inch stack of assembly print-outs), Microsoft handed the code for 1.25 and 2.0 to the Computer History Museum back in 2014.

Nice to know.
And it is available elsewhere as a ISO for a bookable CD!
https://superuser.com/questions/1230464/how-do-i-create-a-custom-bootable-ms-dos-iso-image.

In the link above the user had some issue with it.
But it works for me.  :D

Salmon Trout

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Re: News You missed; Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS .
« Reply #1 on: December 21, 2018, 02:48:13 PM »
Microsoft ain't crazy, they are releasing something obsolete. Even MS-DOS 2.0 is limited compared to later versions. Support up to 16 MB or 32 MB FAT12 formatted hard disk drives depending on the formatting tool shipped by OEMs, and 5.25-inch, 180 KB and 360 KB floppy disks. Version 3.30 was the first version I ever used. Supports 3.5-inch, 1.44 MB floppy drives and diskettes, extended and logical partitions. I had an Epson Equity II PC-XT clone with a 40 MB hard drive and a CGA adapter. I later got a Hercules card and a compatible monitor in exchange for a moped that didn't run. Happy days. I then pirated MS-DOS 6.22 from a friend's machine by copying everything onto a stack of floppies over about a week.

Geek-9pm

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Re: News You missed; Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS .
« Reply #2 on: December 21, 2018, 03:03:19 PM »
This first link I gave mentions GitHub.
Here is some info about GitHub mad why it matters to software developers.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/06/18/what-is-github
Published in The  Economist , Jun 18th 201.
Quote
STEVE BALLMER, Microsoft’s former chief executive, became an internet meme when he gave a speech to employees in which he bounced across the stage shouting “developers” over a dozen times. While much has changed since Mr Ballmer’s chant, developers remain central to Microsoft’s strategy. Earlier this month his successor, Satya Nadella, announced that Microsoft would acquire GitHub, a platform for hosting software code—especially “open-source” projects—for $7.5bn. Developers took to the internet in outrage, predicting a slow death for the service. Many non-coders, meanwhile, were left wondering what all the fuss was about. What is GitHub, and why do developers care so much about it?

GitHub is designed around Git, a system for tracking changes in software code. Git was originally created by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish-American software engineer, to track changes in Linux, an open-source rival to Windows that he designed. Unlike the previous generation of version-control software, Git was designed to track software written by a large, disparate group, rather than by a managed team at a software company. It allows multiple developers to work on the same code in different places, and to integrate their changes later. But whereas Git makes such collaboration possible, it hardly makes it easy. To work out just what another developer has changed requires users to enter arcane directives at a command prompt and scroll through pages of text
Finding full documentation for older MS-DOS version is still a challenge.  :'(

Salmon Trout

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Re: News You missed; Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS .
« Reply #3 on: December 21, 2018, 04:30:08 PM »
I later got a Hercules card and a compatible monitor in exchange for a moped that didn't run.

The moped was brought back to life and still runs. 25 years later. Can't say the same for the PC.

DaveLembke



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Re: News You missed; Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS .
« Reply #4 on: January 04, 2019, 01:02:49 PM »
Very Cool Salmon.

My first PC was my friend and me riding our bicycles around and we cut through a businesses parking lot as a shortcut to a store to buy candy and we spotted computers stacked by a dumpster in the summer of 1984. We went over and was checking it out and the guy that worked there saw us looking through it all. I was 9 then, and the guy said are you kids looking to trash pick a computer. I said if allowed to I would love to have one. The guy helped us pick out the parts we needed to assemble them back home. We made about 6 trips riding our bikes 6 city blocks back home to drop off the computer pieces straddled between our legs on our bikes. The guy gave us cassettes and some floppies and books as well for them. The 30 or so computers they were throwing away were Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 computers with 16k RAM expansion modules connected to the keyboard which was the computer with its 4k RAM and memory expansion through ribbon cables to a silver box that was like a boom box on its side that the monitor sat on top of.

That was my first experience to my own computer. Tandy's DOS was different than Microsofts. My first exposure to MS-DOS was version 2.11 with GW-Basic at school in 1985. Teacher heard about me self teaching myself BASIC and so I was then exposed to the 8088 computer that the school had and GW-Basic to program on in my free time and after school.

patio

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Re: News You missed; Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS .
« Reply #5 on: January 04, 2019, 05:10:32 PM »
Brilliant story...Thanx for sharing...
" Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined. "