Microsoft makes MS-DOS once again open-source. This time the tech giant published the code on GitHub. These are MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0. This follows an earlier decision by Microsoft to make MS-DOS open-source via the Computer History Museum – a choice it made in 2014.
The choice to publish GitHub on MS-DOS was made because it is much easier to find, read and refer to the MS-DOS source files when they are on a GitHub repo than when they are in the original compressed archive,” says senior product manager Rich Turner, who also leads the work on Windows Subsystem for Linus.
Don’t make any adjustments
The source files that Microsoft has placed on GitHub are only there for reference and internal experiments. Microsoft does not allow any changes to the code. The publication is therefore mainly done because of the historical value of the software. The code was previously published in the Computer History Museum for educational purposes.
MS-DOS was released in the course of December 1980. The release of MS-DOS 1.25 took place in May 1983 and its successor MS-DOS 2.0 in August 1983. The aforementioned version consists of seven source files. Expansion was quick, because version 2.0 eventually consisted of more than a hundred files.
MS-DOS stands for Microsoft Disk Operating System. It’s one of the first operating systems to be released and quite basic in functionality. From version 7.0 it was included with Windows 95 and a hidden system in the software.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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