Microsoft itself has only released source for dos versions 1.25, 2.0 and
4.0. There are some commercial dos systems that released source for
their versions of dos, such as opendos which was caldera dos, they
released their version of dos 7.0, which I do have, as well as PTS dos,
which released their last version of dos in source form as well, which I
have as well. I can't find any license stuff on the PTS dos source, so
I have no idea whether their source can be used in anything other than
strictly personal environments, but I did have the opendos sources when
they were released, and they were under a standard opensource license
back when they were released, but then that decision was reversed for
some reason, and further releases of that particular dos (of which I
think there was only 1) were no longer opensource, but that doesn't
really matter, since the opensource version is still available.
That means, on a good day, folks can see at least three ways of doing
things in dos (legally), though there were versions of MS-DOS version
6.0 that escaped into the wild in source form, which I did have a copy
of at one point, though that hd died many many years ago, and I no
longer have those sources. I do recall answering a question on a mud
one time about the time/date field in dos, since there was some argument
about how large the integer was representing the time field. Looking at
ms-dos and opendos sources (I didn't have PTS dos sources at the time),
there was a difference in the size of the variable used for that field,
though I don't remember which dos had the larger variable type, though I
did find it interesting that they used different integer types.
On 5/12/2024 3:48 AM, Karen Lewellen wrote:
Hi Travis,
Does that mean the MS Dos code for 7 or so is has been releaced now as
well?
Sorry you lost your DOS machines in a move.
Karen
On Sun, 12 May 2024, Travis Siegel via Freedos-user wrote:
Since there was a discussion here recently on multitasking with dos,
I'd like to mention that the github versions of ms-dos has a
directory called v4.0-ozzie
That directory has some interesting stuff in it, one of them is a
couple of dissk images (I need to move them to a linux machine and
see if they'll mount, I don't have anything on windows that can
identify them), but they also have some documentation (in pdf format)
about how their session manager works, and how to make dos
applications multitask. The session manager program is present as
well, so folks could probably mess around with that to see how well
(or not) it works. It might be something worth experimenting with
for those who actually want multiple dos programs running.
I'm highly disappointed I lost my dos machines when we moved about
2.5 years ago, I'd have had a lot of fun playing with this.
Also, interestingly enough, just for reference, all of the ms-dos
source code has been released under a MIT license. I find that
particularly interesting. Apparently, Microsoft was serious when
they said they're releasing the code for experimenting, and to see
how early operating systems worked.
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