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Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- selectodude 12y agoI wonder if they deleted all the "fucks" out of it. The Win2K source code was good for a laugh.
- ehPReth 12y agoWord v1.1a: $ grep -ri fuck . ./Opus/asm/wordgrep.asm:; BP is used as always, the other registers are free to fuck with. ./Opus/asm/wordgrep.asm: je another_fucking_out_of_range_jump ./Opus/asm/wordgrep.asm:another_fucking_out_of_range_jump: MS-DOS v1.1 & v2.0: $ grep -ri fuck .
- not_that_noob 12y agoMS-DOS would have been delivered to IBM as code, so they cleaned it up for the suits. Word on the other hand...
- pera 12y ago;FIND.ASM 165 badfart proc far ;(what a hack!!) 166 ret 167 badfart endp
- NAFV_P 12y agoMay I ask how common is this uncouth behaviour? I do remember this [0] being posted a few months ago, apparently "penguin" is an expletive (what the fuck?).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- wingerlang 12y ago"DOS hit" or "do shit" ?
- dalek2point3 12y agojust in case someone from MS is reading -- is it also possible to put this code under the public domain or at least under a free license? I'm very worried about the fact that some of this old code, though useless to MS at this moment, will be lost for follow-on use by folks today.
- jw2013 12y agoYou may use, copy, compile, and create Derivative Works of the software, and run the software and Derivative Works on simulators or hardware solely for non-commercial research, experimentation, and educational purposes. Examples of non-commercial uses are teaching, academic research, public demonstrations, and personal experimentation. “Derivative Works” means modifications to the software, in source code or object code form, made by you pursuant to this agreement. You may copy and refer to any documentation provided as part of the software. You may not distribute or publish the software or Derivative Works. You may not use or test the software to provide a commercial service unless Microsoft permits you to do so under another agreement. You may publish and present papers or articles on the results of your research, and while distribution of all or substantial portions of the software is not permitted, you may include in any such publication or presentation an excerpt of up to fifty (50) lines of code for illustration purposes.
- e1ven 12y agoThis is a cool historical artifact, and I'm glad MS released it. I don't think there's much to gain in releasing it under a broader license - I would imagine that most programs that would need to expand or otherwise build upon this code would be better served by using one of the modern clones, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDOS They have a modern toolchain, are actively in development, and seem like they would be much easier to add features to, if one found themselves with such a need.
- dalek2point3 12y agobut, but -- you're assuming that what I want to do is build on DOS to do what DOS did but better. What if I wanted to visualize the code in some interesting way? What if I wanted to compare the first versions of Linux and DOS and compare them for their modularity and do a research project on how they affected productivity in firms? And these are only the use cases that I could think of while finishing my cup of tea ...
- pera 12y agoDownload link: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-research-license-agreement-msdos-v1-1-v2-0/ http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-research-lice...
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ehPReth 12y agoDirect(er) links: * MS-DOS v1.1 and v2.0: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-research-license-agreement-msdos-v1-1-v2-0/ http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-research-lice... * Word v1.1a: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-research-license-agreement-msword-v-1-1a/ http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-research-lice...
- comboy 12y ago503, any mirror?
- ehPReth 12y agoHere you go: * https://mega.co.nz/#F!jAhUzLCC!2i187wbXL7WUF3587YaMfw https://mega.co.nz/#F!jAhUzLCC!2i187wbXL7WUF3587YaMfw * http://www.sendspace.com/filegroup/61DF3FLY3Z3pnWTHQMzcRQ http://www.sendspace.com/filegroup/61DF3FLY3Z3pnWTHQMzcRQ SHA-256: ed62a98801f15cf9b7f229e33c7413d1ff9d1e1e91e9aa2468742589b65e156d msdos.zip b424c3c1c1d7083cc74c9b1b77823eb511739c4237cb7a2f1650b75391f43ff6 Word-1.1a-CHM-Distribution.zip
- nolok 12y agoThose are not legal, redistribution is not permitted by the license.
- username42 12y agoIS it really redistribution or network caching ;-)
- sai1511 12y agoI think making IE open source will be very interesting....!
- MrZongle2 12y agoMaybe in the same way a tour of a sausage factory would be interesting....
- fbeans 12y agoAlthough a sausage factory would be bad, at least each tour would be standard, and at least visiting that sausage factory wouldn't compromise your security and your liberty and finally when you get home with your free tour sausages, at least they'd interact with your saucepan the same way all the other sausages do. Perhaps I've taken this meataphor too far?
- MrZongle2 12y agoPerhaps. But I was amused. :D
- zhte415 12y agoI have been on a tour of a sausage factory. It is extremely interesting. For example, all pigs are required to be of a length, weight, and several other dimensions, in order to be approved to join the production line.
- yuhong 12y agoI wonder if at least providing shared source limited to IE would be possible.
- dtech 12y agoWell they just released source from 1980 and IE1 is from 1995, so wait another 15 years.
- sirkneeland 12y ago
- spodek 12y agoUnder what license? Can we view, modify, redistribute? No one wants to get sued for these things, or being found to violate some end user license agreement with some other Microsoft software. On the other hand, I'd love to find out that people viewing this code contribute an improvement that no one in Microsoft saw in decades that helps them improve something today, leading them to soften their stance on Free Software and copyright. We can dream.
- gnoway 12y agoMicrosoft Research License. Yes, Yes, No.
- herge 12y agoHow can a license allow modification without redistribution?
- squintychino 12y agoWhy do you have to redistribute something in order to modify it? Just modify it for your own personal use.
- tensenki 12y agoI can't think of a single use case where I would want to hack on a 32 year old OS without distributing it.
- Someone 12y agoNot quite the same, but it may be good enough for you: I guess you can distribute a patch, combined with a URL to the original download.
- delinka 12y agoSince when do you need a license to modify something for your own personal use? If they've given me access to the source, I can just start editing to my heart's content...
- lunchbox 12y agoClarification: this is about MS Word 1.1a, which was released in 1990.
- agumonkey 12y agoOther notable facts that year : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(programming_language)#Haskell_1.0_to_1.4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(programming_language)...
- pekk 12y agoLiterally everything on HN is an opportunity for another Haskell advertisement.
- agumonkey 12y agoI won't disagree, but I realized that even before I got a computer, Haskell was officially born. It baffles me that this very advanced gem was already there, yet so few knew. http://file.vintageadbrowser.com/l-veh5m82f5jultw.jpg http://file.vintageadbrowser.com/l-veh5m82f5jultw.jpg
- roberto56 12y agoTo this day still few know...
- yuhong 12y agoWhat is funny is that MS-DOS 6.0 source code had already been leaked. Granting permission to IBM to make OS/2 source code available would be nice too BTW.
- zokier 12y agoOS/2 is owned by Serenity/eComStation these days and they seem still to be doing active development on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EComStation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EComStation
- yuhong 12y agoBut I think it still contains code owned by MS.
- userbinator 12y agoMS-DOS 6.0 and a customisation kit for 3.x were the leaks I remember seeing. MS-DOS 2.x is not so interesting in comparison.
- qwerta 12y agoWindows source code was available for a long time. My university had access to Win 2000 and some latter versions. Nobody was interested since most kernel hackers used BSD and later Linux.
- bananas 12y agoThis is true. It leaked from Mainsoft a few years back. Was great fun reading through the NT4 and 2k source. It has also been useful for working out what the hell goes on inside Win32 on occasion.
- SixSigma 12y agoWhile there was a leak, the source code was available to industry partners and educational institutions legitimately.
- yuhong 12y agoI wonder what is the current status of Win2000 custom support.
- Someone 12y agoWas? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/default.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/default.aspx (some strings attached)
- ballard 12y agoYup. I had the beta source of win 2k when it was refered to as NT 5.
- herokusaki 12y agoPretty cool. One question comes to mind, though: if I ever want to contribute to FreeDOS or LibreOffice should I refrain from reading this code?
- pera 12y agoNop: this is too old so it's pretty much obsolete now
- ptx 12y agoBut it will nevertheless be under copyright until long after we're all dead, so if you read it Microsoft could presumably still decide to sue you for copyright infringement if that ever happens to seem advantageous for them. I think that's what the parent comment was asking about.
- justin66 12y ago> But it will nevertheless be under copyright until long after we're all dead, so if you read it Microsoft could presumably still decide to sue you for copyright infringement if that ever happens to seem advantageous for them. You'd have to actually, you know, infringe their copyrights. It's hard to know if you're one of the many who are confused about copyright, patent, and trademark but just reading the code doesn't put you on the hook for anything.
- ptx 12y agoCouldn't they pick any piece of code you write that happens to looks similar to some piece of code in MS-DOS and argue that it is in fact derived from their code, if it's known that you previously read the MS-DOS code? Sort of like the "rangeCheck" portion of the Google v. Oracle case. With patents it doesn't matter whether you read their code or not: you're screwed in any case. But with copyright the history of the code matters, so it could matter if you have seen their code before writings yours, I think.
- 12y ago
- sgt 12y agoWell, I had this already - but wouldn't mind a legal copy of the source code after all these years.
- shmerl 12y agois it useful for DOSbox?
- logicallee 12y agoUseful? The next three weeks of HN will be: MS-DOS cross-compiled to JAVASCRIPT. MS-DOS running in pure CSS. Word for Windows as pure HTML 5 (<brainfuck> element). DOOM RUNNING NATIVELY on NATIVE MS-DOS on a PEBBLE.
- joezydeco 12y agoHow about 2084 in a TSR utility?
- joezydeco 12y agoWhoops, I mean 2048. Big Robotron fan here.
- neurobro 12y agoIt would be so much terser and more elegant in Haskell.
- smacktoward 12y agoDon't forget the inevitable "Flappy Word" games!
- dalek2point3 12y agobrilliant, love it.
- _nedR 12y agoOh.. how I wish you were joking..
- turrini 12y agoand don't forget: 2048-DOS!
- leoh 12y ago
- Tloewald 12y agoMaybe someone will produce a version of Word for Windows 1.1a that runs on a modern OS, and I'll be able to open and edit documents that have been impossible to open in later versions of Word (of course Word for Windows 2.0 would open the document, convert it to its new format in place, and then crash, so I'd need to find un-borked versions of the documents first).
- yuhong 12y agoI don't believe Word for Windows actually writes to the file until you save it.
- Tloewald 12y agoIf I recall correctly, Word for Windows 2 had autosave on by default, and would corrupt Word for Windows files with embedded drawings so that they became impossible to edit. (Experienced with several files at the time.)
- ehPReth 12y agoFrom ./Opus/asm/formatn.asm in Word v1.1a: ; /* Following comment is preserved verbatim for eternity */ ; /* Rounding becomes a non-existant issue due to brilliant re-thinking */ ; /* "What a piece of work is man ; How noble in reason ; In form and movement, ; how abject and admirable..." ; Bill "Shake" Spear [describing Sand Word] */
- happycube 12y agoTo split hairs, it's actually DOS 2.11. MSHEAD.ASM has a version history.
- wvenable 12y agoI had a handheld PC -- the Atari Portfolio -- that ran that version of DOS.
- thiagoc 12y agoError 503 Service Unavailable
- WalterBright 12y agoI think this is great, and long overdue. Not only from a historical perspective, but for future people who may need to run some ancient software in order to extract some ancient data from obsolete formats. I sure wish Turtlebeach would open source the software on their Audiotron. They abandoned it maybe 10 years ago, but it's still far and away the best standalone media player, but it could seriously use a software update.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoMost if not all of what MS-DOS did has been re-created under FreeDOS. [1] Writing an equivalent to Word 1.1 is also pretty straight forward. So I'm not sure what the fuss is about with regards to licenses, it is a historical artifact, and fun to look at, but kind of useless as a code base to start from. [1] http://www.freedos.org/ http://www.freedos.org/
- bdg 12y agoNot having an ability to view the source online was driving me insane. Hopefully I scratched your itch too. https://github.com/Incognito/msdos https://github.com/Incognito/msdos
- habith 12y agoThird bullet point in the license you presumably agreed to before downloading the source code: - You may not distribute or publish the software or Derivative Works. I'm not saying it's a good license, but if you do not agree with or at least intend to follow it then perhaps you should have not downloaded it to begin with.
- bdg 12y agoI'm reasonably sure I violated 10 laws since I woke up.
- publicfig 12y agoJust so you're aware, I'm not positive that this is allowed under the Microsoft Research License.
- bdg 12y agoThanks for the tip. I solved the problem forever by deleting the open source code from the Internet. Bang up job by MS legal on this one. I'm confident this will prevent other distributions of this software.
- Dorian-Marie 12y agoI am waiting for people to send Pull Request on that (for \ vs / for instance)
- yiedyie 12y agoI like some of the Microsoft products, but at least if they had been releasing MS-DOS 6 or 7 and Word 5 that would mean at least a bit of something, but this ... And all released in the "look but don't touch" licence, I guess they need some waving cause of the Win 8 fiasco, the 8.1 fiasco and the retiring support for XP, if it hadn't been for the lucky Win 7, Microsoft would have gone the way of Nokia.
- yiedyie 12y agoMicrosoft is against the current, the other story that run here at HN is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7467165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7467165 And that's why Microsoft is at a turning point in 2014.
- SixSigma 12y agoFrom Word If dos_ver == "dr dos" then Print("error") Abort() End if
- mato 12y agoThis tidbit from the DOS 2.0 README.txt (section 5) is fascinating: 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). Also this, from the documentation for the CharOper system call (that never made it outside of MSFT?) in SYSCALL.txt: AL Function -- -------- 0 DL, on return, will contain the DOS switch character. On most systems this will default to '-'. 1 Set the switch character to the character in DL. 2 Read the device availability byte into DL. If this byte is 0, then devices must be accessed in file I/O calls by /dev/device. If this byte is non-zero, then the devices are available at every node of the directory tree (i.e. CON is the console device not the file CON). This byte is generally 0. 3 Set the device availability byte to the value in DL. It looks like we have IBM to blame for '\' and '/' as a path separator/switch character in DOS/Windows, Microsoft originally was using the Xenix '/' and '-' respectively. I knew that Microsoft used Xenix fairly heavily internally but never thought that DOS was quite so influenced by it.
- whoopdedo 12y agoAnd to this day we're still barred from creating files or directories named CON, PRN, NUL ... Damn you, IBM
- loevborg 12y agoNot just CON but also con.txt, con.js, etc.! Try cloning a git repository with a file called con.js using msysgit. The result is that, when msysgit tries to clone the file, the contents of the file `con.js` are printed to stdout, i.e. to CON.
- quasque 12y agoIt's interesting to see the real specification for this system call, as only the device availability subfunctions were widely known outside of Microsoft [1]. I wonder if many other hidden or deprecated functions are present in these releases. [1] http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/65/27.html http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/65/27.html
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y agoThose MS-DOS 5.0 manuals were sure good.
- bovermyer 12y agoI think a lot of people here are missing the point of this. Microsoft didn't release the source code for these old versions of their software so people could use it, hack on it, and make new versions. They released it because it's historically interesting. As someone who is both a developer and a history graduate, I think it's fascinating.
- akira2501 12y agoThe fact that this was released to the "Computer History Museum" was apparently missed or not understood by the majority of the audience.
- ytjohn 12y agoThis will probably lead to a new RTF exploit...
- yuhong 12y agoNote on the .doc included in Word for Windows 1.1a source code package: You will probably have to unblock the old Word file formats before you can open them in current versions of Word. In Word 2003 SP3 and Word 2007 you have to manually edit the registry, later versions provide UI for doing it. This won't work for the Word for MS-DOS files which requires a separate converter.
- gren 12y agovery useful nowaday!
- DanBC 12y agoMy "Future Computers MSDOS 2" manual finally has a use! http://imgur.com/ejnlHY1 http://imgur.com/ejnlHY1 http://imgur.com/7NzGGWO http://imgur.com/7NzGGWO http://imgur.com/ljOV7XJ http://imgur.com/ljOV7XJ
- INTPenis 12y agoManuals were just so awesome in those days. Here's my favorite from when I was a kid. http://imgur.com/aTn6wVh,ry3LXlb http://imgur.com/aTn6wVh,ry3LXlb
- steven_pack 12y agoFascinating. Now THIS is a museum. There was obviously scope for personality in the commenting... arena_free_next: CMP BYTE PTR DS:[DI],arena_signature_end ; end of road, Jack? retz ; never come back no more CALL arena_next ; next item in ES/AX carry set if tras And a nice reminder of the other big players of the day: IF WANG ;Are we assembling for WANG?
- malbs 12y agoDamn. If only they released Word 2.0. Then I could hack it to work on newer versions of Windows. It's still the single best word processing package in the history of this universe.
- rkda 12y agoTitle's misleading. Should have specified the version of Word they're open sourcing.
- bite 12y agoRegardless of the license, I definitely like the direction Microsoft seems to be going in. First they make Microsoft office online free to the public, there's talk about windows mobile one day being free, and now this. All within a rather short amount of time. I don't see myself switching from GNU/Linux any time soon however, but I hope Microsoft will soon realize the potential of Open Source. One company I really appreciate is Adobe, they put a surprising amount of effort into Open Source, and also released Photoshop v1.0.1 source. On a side note; I wonder when Windows' will post their first project on Github.
- al2o3cr 12y agoMeh, I'll be interested when they release the source from the "fuck over DR-DOS" era. Maybe when the statute of limitations for antitrust expires...
- ilovecookies 12y agoFinally the word soure code has been released! I have been waiting so long for this blessed moment! Why the ---- does this have 656 upvotes? Microsoft PR campaign anyone? "Microsoft had under 100 employees and a Microsoft product (MS-DOS) had less than 300KB". Yeah, that is still alot of employees compared to new software companies today. And the sourcecode? Well resources for software development were much scarce back then, both computer and human wise.
- ciderpunx 12y agoIn the syscall docs under "C A V E A T P R O G R A M M E R" > Certain structures, constants and system calls below > are private to the DOS and are extremely > version-dependent. They may change at any time at the > implementors' whim. That pretty much summarises my experience of trying to work with Microsoft products. Arbitrary, undocumented API changes every time the version number changes "at the implementors' whim".
- zenciadam 12y agoSource for MS-DOS has been floating around the internet for about 15 years now. I guess they got around to removing all the curse words and comments where the programmers bash each other.
- rootuid 12y agolame. License states that one can't host it anywhere. No point to the release. Too little , too late from the dinosaur.
- AndreyKarpov 12y agoChecking Microsoft Word 1.1a with PVS-Studio. Just for fun. http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0245/ http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0245/