It's baaack! Microsoft and IBM open source MS-DOS 4.0
It's no joke. Microsoft and IBM have joined forces to open-source the 1988 operating system MS-DOS 4.0 under the MIT License. Why? Well, why not?
As Scott Hanselman, Microsoft's VP of the developer community, and Jeff Wilcox, head of Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office, recount in Microsoft's Open Source Blog, "a young English researcher named Connor 'Starfrost' Hyde corresponded recently with former Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie" about the relationship between DOS 4, Multitasking DOS (MT-DOS), and what would become IBM and Microsoft's OS/2.
That got Hanselman and Wilcox digging into the Microsoft archives. The blog post continues: "While they were unable to find the full source code for MT-DOS, they did find MS-DOS 4.00, which we're releasing today, alongside these additional beta binaries, PDFs of the documentation, and disk images."
This isn't the first time Microsoft has released MS-DOS source code. Back in 2014, Microsoft open-sourced the MS-DOS source code for versions 1.25 and 2.0 via the Computer History Museum.
