MS-DOS 4.0 From 1988 Is Now Open-Source Software

Being such an old operating system, open sourcing this is not something that's actually "useful" in the same way as most other open source software. This is more about preserving the history of computers than anything else, since MS-DOS 4.0 isn't all that useful even in the world of retro computing. Many applications and DOS-based games require MS-DOS 5.0 or 6.0, and the last public release of MS-DOS 6.22 is usually the best choice. There's also FreeDOS, which is an open-source DOS clone that has been under development since 1994, and can run nearly all applications and drivers intended for MS-DOS.

Microsoft released the source code of some of the very first versions of MS-DOS years ago, so it's nice to see the company also give the same treatment to some later MS-DOS versions. It also makes us wonder whether Microsoft might actually choose to open-source in the same manner some of the earlier versions of Windows in the long term. This particular version of MS-DOS was released a little less than two years before the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990, largely considered to be the very first successful release of Windows. It's something we'd definitely be interested in checking out.

Source: Microsoft

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