IT'S TRUE! Microsoft releases its operating system SOURCE CODE

Or even DOS 6?

But seriously, what I'd like to see (or have available to people who can actually read it) is the source to StarFlight. What those programmers did on two floppy disks was spectacular!

I would like the source code to all the Sinclair Spectrum games just for novelty value.

Another thing that would be fun to do, would be to get the source code for CPM and run it in an emulated environment. (Was CPM source ever released?)

To make the emulation realistic, of course, you would need to introduce delays during floppy disk accesses in order to emulate the feel of computer systems in that era. Some clickity-clackity sound effects during disk accesses would earn extra geek points. Remember the whining sound that you heard during disk-seek while the worm gear moved the head to the selected track?

Ahhh, the nostalgia. The days when your entire OS and development tool chain fit nicely in 360KB of storage.

(In contrast, I'm posting this from an ultrabook that is nearly running out of space on its 250GB ssd drive.)

> Was CPM source ever released?

http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html

jdixon, great link.

I recognized a few things on that page in addition to the OS. I recall using asm80 and link in my toolchain. Also a version of Forth was available on CP/M which gave us a convenient interpreted scripting language.

An accurate headline would read 'Microsoft Releases 86-DOS Source Code', because that's pretty much what the first releases of MS-DOS were, with a few tweaks to run on Intel 8086 processors on the shiny new IBM PC. All they've ever innovated is bushwah.

Oh, and that famous deal with IBM? Thank Mary Gates, Bill Gates' mom, who was buds with IBM's president. Which may also explain IBM's inexplicable brain fart in letting the baby Microsoft retain rights to 86-DOS/MS-DOS/PC-DOS (all the same thing), paying them a royalty on every IBM PC sold with PC-DOS, and letting them sell it to anyone and everyone else.

Yep, MS' catapult into the os business is a good example of it doesn't matter what you know, it only matters who you know. Or to take a line from Wicked, it's not about aptitude it's about how you're viewed.

Quoting:All they've ever innovated is bushwah.

I dunno. Their marketing and legal departments have been... um... creative.