The README for 2.0 contains an interesting apology to OEMs:<p>> The user manual contains some significant errors. Most of these are
due to last minute changes to achieve a greater degree of compatibility
with IBM's implementation of MS-DOS (PC DOS). This includes the use
of "\" instead of "/" as the path separator, and "/" instead of "-"
as the switch character. For transporting of batch files across
machines, Microsoft encourages the use of "\" and "/" respectively
in the U.S. market. (See DOSPATCH.TXT for how you can overide this.
The user guide explains how the end-user can override this in CONFIG.SYS).
Both the printer echo keys and insert mode keys have now been made to
toggle. The default prompt (this may also be changed by the user
with the PROMPT command) has been changed from "A:" to "A>".
We apologize for any inconveniences these changes may have caused
your technical publications staff.<p>So MS-DOS almost had Unix-style file separators and argument switches!
It's MIT licensed too!<p><a href="https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/LICENSE.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/LICENSE.md</a><p>I was kind of surprised about that!
It looks like they set the commit dates to match the release dates: <a href="https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/commits/master" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/commits/master</a>
Don't overlook the email by v1.25 (and v2.0?) author Tim Paterson:<p><a href="https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v1.25/Tim_Paterson_16Dec2013_email.txt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v1.25/Tim_Pa...</a><p>... or the version history in the v2.0 MSHEAD.ASM file:<p><a href="https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/MSHEAD.ASM" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/...</a><p>EDIT: Found better version history
Shocking to think this is where PCs got started. On my first encounters with MS-DOS I was underwhelmed, the Acorn BBC Micro came with better software and it was all in ROM. I could not believe that this was serious software.
Interesting, all sources of MS-DOS 1.25 is just 12K lines of code, including comments.<p>Today, this seems like a pretty small project, and most commercial apps are significantly bigger.
Well it has a place, I suppose. For me: I wasted a lot of time and effort farting around with config.sys and autoexec.bat getting drivers to load etc.<p>Could I sue for lifetime wasted?
I'd like to see tiny 80x86 boards (about the size of the Pi Zero) that you could boot DOS on, with full access to GPIO/SERIAL/PARALLEL etc. I know arduino exists in this space, but for DOS lovers, little hobbyist boards like this would be great, and ideal for bootstrapping single purpose apps written in C.
Wonder if and when we will get closer to seeing existing windows apps open sourced. It looks like they may be doing clean up of old codebases to release
Does anyone remember a particular DOS programming guide that dove deep into the internals, distributed as textfiles written by a single author on contract from (I believe) the US Navy?
Universities and industry groups, esp. security folks, get full source copies of Windows and more... with big bear-trap, PMITAP NDA's. I have/had a NT5/Win2k source CD somewhere in my empire of junk.
I have tons of nostalgia for DOS having first used it in 1992. However, as soon as I used Linux in 1994, it was instantly apparent how backward and hard to use DOS was compared to Unix-like systems. With hardware like Raspberry Pis, not sure why anyone would want to use DOS on x86 for embedded purposes today.