Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 12th Nov 2007 16:44 UTC, submitted by Oliver
"This is extraordinary news for all nerds, computer scientists and the Open Source community: the source code of the MULTICS operating system (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), the father of UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened [get it here]. Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system started in 1964 and introduced a large number of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be considered to be a 'simplified' successor to MULTICS (the name 'Unix' is itself a hack on 'Multics'). The last running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000."
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Member since:2007-10-09
it's no secret that Microsoft goes a long way (or so they say) to make sure that legacy applications run on Windows... I'd day MS programmers have to support APIs going back to MS-DOS 3.0...
Judging from Vista, I would say DOS support is not even close to their priority these days. QEMU + FreeDOS will have to suffice (probably well beyond SP1).
Edited 2007-11-12 23:07
Member since:2006-01-02
Well, they do that via a virtual machine environment which runs on top of the Win32 subsystem. So I wouldn't say that DOS is a critical or core component of Windows, by far. The NT kernel, in fact, has very little in common with DOS. The old-style APIs are only on the very surface of Win32 (the APIs exported by the core DLLs: kernel32.dll, gdi32.dll and user32.dll). All the other Windows APIs, such as those exported by ntdll.dll, the kernel and other newer components have very little win3.1 or DOS in them. Heck, even the old style Windows API calls aren't very DOS-y at all.
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Member since:
2005-12-18
He's serious!
Come on!!! it's no secret that Microsoft goes a long way (or so they say) to make sure that legacy applications run on Windows... I'd day MS programmers have to support APIs going back to MS-DOS 3.0... and we all know how good Microsoft Software is in general... so no wonder things fail anyway.