Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS source from the museum and sticks it in GitHub

Re: To some MSDOS was an major leap forward.

Sounds like good parenting to me - and sound economics.

Good parenting yes, sound economics? No. In reality, his mother has paid 100% of the price tag, not the half claimed; that's just an accounting fiction.

Perhaps kit-buying mothers have a better grasp of economics than self-confessed lucre louts?

Unfortunately there's no evidence for that in either the original post nor yours.

Re: To some MSDOS was an major leap forward.

I've never even heard of that OS before. It was like it was Linux being invented from the description but for back then that wasn't to bad looking and for people that have run win 3.11 will know that the stuff all looked similar and some of those images reminded me of Geocities webpages, they were so weirdly the same overdone themes to try to stand out but often I would hit a page that looked like a paint factory exploded and my mind would just take the info from my eyes and say "nope, fuck this shit I'm gonna have a migrain even if I happen to find out how to navigate this atrocity of a webpage design that someone thought was the best they had in them and their site was so much better from all the chaos of colors. Hell the flat design of many websites kind of gets on the nerves also like driving for hours in the mid west and realizing that the view hasn't changed for a few hundred miles and you're so bored.

Re: To some MSDOS was an major leap forward.

We had a Z8000 unix system, the first unix sytem I ever saw.

Re: To some MSDOS was an major leap forward.

"The Z8000 was late and a disaster compared to 68000."

It worked OK. My first Unix box was a Z8000 Onyx although what was sold was a bit tightly configured. We had to by another half meg of memory and a 40 meg disk for the database. Moved on from there to a trio of Zilog boxes.

"DOS pretty much was a clone of CP/M86, which was barely more than a translation of CP/M 80."

I thought QDOS which became MSDSOE was written because Digital Research were dragging their feet over CP/M-86.

Re: To some MSDOS was an major leap forward.

In another life a very long time ago, I can remember working on a Wyse based Xenix multi user system with an Intel 80186 as the chip.

Re: To some MSDOS was an major leap forward.

You've got a selective memory, the 8088/6 and DOS weren't ideal but made a lot of sense at the time. The 8088 was cheaper, enabled the use of an existing design, and mostly interfaced to 8 bit peripherals.

When the IBM PC came out, that DOS would win was not a given. It had the option of DOS initially, but also CP/M-86, and UCSD p-system. There was a huge amount of CP/M software available, and that no doubt informed the extremely CP/M like initial design of DOS, that it slowly diverged from.

It's true that most 286s ran DOS, but it wasn't for a lack of Intel trying. The 286 was explicitly designed as a server chip (in some ways the Pentium Pro of its time). If it was aimed at running DOS they would have included more real mode functionality and easier ways to switch between protected and real mode.

The real problem was memory usage, whether on the 286 or 386 onwards. OS/2, Unix, and Windows NT all used a considerable amount of memory for the time. They all had spotty driver support, and native applications were in short supply.

Re: To some MSDOS was an major leap forward.

Windows 7 wasn't a service pack for Vista, Vista had two service packs.

Windows 7 kernal was only numbered 6.1 for application compatibly, so you didn't get a bunch of apps checking kernel number and giving an error that they were not compatible with that version of Windows.

This is the same reason Microsoft skipped Windows 9, because badly coding version checks could mistake it for Windows 95 or 98.

Re: To some MSDOS was an major leap forward.

I thought MS Basic was ported to the Altair from DEC PDP-8 source code and adapted from there.

Re: To some MSDOS was an major leap forward.

Back in the day UNIX was 16 bit.

More than likely because most Z80 machines back in the day only had enough memory for a UNIX kernel and not much else.

A Spectrum 128K/+3 or Amstrad CPC 6128 could just about manage it, if you could live without memory management. A 6502 machine like a BBC even with extra memory probably couldn't because its stack has a maximum length and is stuck at the bottom of the memory.

apple keyboard

even to this day you don't get the # key printed on a macbook air UK keyboard

Or just as bad, laptop keyboards with the dual-role function keys, where the default action for pressing the key is the alternate role (decrease brightness, switch wifi on etc.) rather than the Fn keypress my muscle memory is expecting...

neither does the French...

No braces for you either (having bought a mechanical keyboard for £20 with the French keyset I later noticed this). But then you can always set a keyboard to a different keyset and let muscle memory figure the rest out (ISO for the win and all that. Down with the ANSI standard and it's silly small enter key)

Bitch, Bitch, Bitch!

Just try doing anything useful (in any language) with an APL keyboard....

Keyboard layouts and symbols

It pains me to say it (as a non-American), but every other keyboard layout (yes, even or perhaps especially British) sucks to some degree, especially that poor runt of a left-shift key (when instead they could have inserted the extra key alongside right-shift, and given us two usably sized, albeit slightly smaller, shift keys instead of one useless one, and one that you barely ever use because the mouse is (more commonly) in your right hand).

The arrangement of symbols on a US keyboard is logical and sensible (single and double quotes on the same key, backslash and pipe on the same key and close to forward slash, etc), unlike the UK keyboard, where, just to fit in the £ sign, somebody seems to have sneezed over most of the rest and has moved most of the symbols to entirely random places.

If you then set a "compose" key, you're in business for just about every accented letter or typological symbol (yes: °C, ², ³, µ, etc, etc) that you might commonly need.

Perhaps it might make sense to add a "column" or two of extra keys to allow every Latin/Greek/Cryillic language to fit easily and have a more internationally-friendly keyboard (with due apologies to Asian languages), but, failing that, I'll go for a US keyboard whenever I have the choice (which, oddly, usually tends to be only Apple: it's virtually impossible to specify your preferred keyboard when buying a Windoze laptop in the UK, sadly).

Normal Windows keyboards?

> The worst are the Apple keyboards, those "special" symbols are on different keys to normal / Windows keyboards...

Remind me again who first* added "special" symbols to their keyboards?

But when Microsoft added their "special" symbols, they somehow became "normal" ?

Normal? You keep using that word....

*Let's not get carried away.I know those Symbolics Lisp machine keyboards had lots of special keys and they probably even predated Apple adding special keys to theirs.

Many systems in the 60's used teletypes to interface to computers. They used a form of ASCII (upper case only) with some characters varying. I remember alt vs esc, back arrow vs underscore, circumflex vs up arrow. I think the currency symbol varied from country to country.

re-keyboard layout

You have to edit the file /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/fr (or de...), change the third- and fourth-level keys to what you want, and you're the king of the keyboard: all the λ, €, á, ó, í, ←→↑↓, ω, Ø, ¿, α, γ, φ, |, ≠, ±, ⋅, ≥, ≤, ß, Σ, δ, Δ ... symbols are yours with Alt-Gr and Shift.

Ah, don't forget the "sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration". You'll need good memory, but if you save that file and re-use it at each new install it'll become quite natural.

Re: "I think AT&T [...] would have known a bit about keyboard layouts"

"Keep in mind IBM back then was one of the largest international companies"

Maybe that's why they have their own Unix brand, AIX, although ISTR the original port wasn't in house, it was by Interactive.

Re: "Keep in mind that back then"

"Keep in mind IBM back then was one of the largest international companies"

If IBM were that infallible how do you explain the special cable that had to be made to join the header to the 9-pin D connector on an AT serial port? Somebody in this mighty international company didn't even know that the numbering convention of a header is different to that of a D connector and nobody reviewed the design to fix it.

Re: "a bunch of engineers in some US uni"

C++ with German comments........what a combination!

I've seen Pascal with German comments and variable names. That was fun to debug...