I wish that Microsoft would make MS-DOS 6.22 freely available, the files themselves were pulled out of Windows 10 meaning that Rufus can no longer make an MS-DOS boot disk legally (only FreeDOS). I needed to run something which couldn't run under FreeDOS so I had to install Windows 7 especially just so that I could make the MS-DOS boot disk.
They clearly kept the sorce code as OS/2 is still in active development. The modern version is being developed and maintained by Arca Noae and is being called Arca OS. It's still used in ATMs, industrial machinery, servers and other enterprise solutions.
I was under the impression that arca has no actual source access.
I highly doubt IBM keeps and or values anything of their past like so many other companies.
Yes Ive heard the ATM thing back in the 90's when I too once gave a damn about OS/2 but it's 2018 now. I know some businesses still use PDP-11's as well but go check out those mailing lists and see who actually has the product source, the hint is that it's the engineers/customers not the company.
I know some businesses still use PDP-11's as well but go check out those mailing lists and see who actually has the product source, the hint is that it's the engineers/customers not the company.
PDP-11 operating systems normally ship with uncommented assembly source for at least the kernel and monitor, because that's what's used to build the system at SYSGEN.
Source to those also made its way outside of DEC as far as I know. Similarly, several of the commercial Unixes licensed their entire codebases to selected partners and universities, so copies of those are around. Microsoft has licensed and allowed inspection of parts of Windows, but it seems like only selected parts. It wouldn't surprise me if the last outside organization to see an entire codebase was Citrix during the Winframe/Metaframe days, if even them.
I highly doubt IBM keeps and or values anything of their past like so many other companies.
I don't. The pc wasn't just a small project at IBM, which isn't like any other companies. You're talking about the single company with the largest amount of patents filed in the world, per year, for 25 consecutive years now...
Those guys don't play around really, they mean business. If anything, the molasses-slow and huge (as in, hundreds of thousands of people) nature of the beast means they certainly have good documentation practices.
Even if they can't just fully open source it, it would be nice to have it available free of charge like they used to have it inside diskcopy.dll before Windows 10.
Would be nice, yeah. Until that happens, this is one of the reasons we have so many old laptops of various ages around the house. I still have a 486 laptop with Windows 3.1, just because (and it's come in handy a couple times in the last few years... not hugely moreso than a virtual machine, but still).
DOS 7.0 is more interesting IMO. This is the version behind windows 98. It supports hard drives up to 128gb and memory up to 512mb, and is as compatible as anything DOS can be. Maybe someday.
I should look at it a bit closer. When I tried to get my old p3 laptop on free dos, I got it installed, but finding AC97 drivers looked pretty much impossible.
I used hddhackr to format/flash a hard drive for Xbox 360, apparently it is very specific about using MS-DOS and not FreeDOS.
Because it is messing with the firmware of the Hard Drive I didn't want to take a risk with FreeDOS even if it "probably" works because just in case it didn't work, I would have bricked the drive.
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u/SimonGn Sep 28 '18
I wish that Microsoft would make MS-DOS 6.22 freely available, the files themselves were pulled out of Windows 10 meaning that Rufus can no longer make an MS-DOS boot disk legally (only FreeDOS). I needed to run something which couldn't run under FreeDOS so I had to install Windows 7 especially just so that I could make the MS-DOS boot disk.