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Open Source Operating Systems

30-Year-Old Operating System 'PC-MOS/386' Finally Open Sourced (github.com) 173

Posted by EditorDavid from the old-OS dept.
PC-MOS/386 "was a multi-user, computer multitasking operating system...announced at COMDEX in November 1986," remembers Wikipedia, saying it runs many MS-DOS titles (though it's optimized for the Intel 80386 processor).

Today Slashdot user Roeland Jansen writes: After some tracking, racing and other stuff...PC-MOS/386 v5.01 is open source under GPLv3. Back in May he'd posted to a virtualization site that "I still have the source tapes. I want(ed) to make it GPL and while I got an OK on it, I haven't had time nor managed to get it legalized. E.g. lift the NDA and be able to publish."

1987 magazine ads described it as "the gateway to the latest technology...and your networking future," and 30 years later its release on GitHub includes sources and executables. "In concert with Gary Robertson and Rod Roark it has been decided to place all under GPL v3."
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30-Year-Old Operating System 'PC-MOS/386' Finally Open Sourced More

30-Year-Old Operating System 'PC-MOS/386' Finally Open Sourced

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  • Revealing my age. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HornWumpus ( 783565 ) on Sunday October 22, 2017 @03:54PM (#55413993)

    I actually tried to make that POS work (to run a multiuser dial in host) back in the late 80s.

    Run away, stunk to heaven. IIRC only worked with _one_ rs232 UART (which had to do all the buffering in hardware). Didn't work well with that one. Just no. Waste of effort and money.

    I should not remember those details...my brain's garbage collection is very lazy.

    I'll download a copy, but only to burn it onto CDs to shoot at. Shades of '30-06 retiring' netmare 2.

    • Re:Revealing my age. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by HornWumpus ( 783565 ) on Sunday October 22, 2017 @04:03PM (#55414029)

      One more thing: The docs were worse than useless, why it stuck in my head. Unless they archived and included their BBS forums, it's truly a waste of storage space.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I wish someone would open source this [wikipedia.org] instead..

  • So, there is now a GPL operating system that will run DOS applications. That's pretty interesting.

    If there were still sufficient "must have" DOS applications that could benefit from a little source code tweaking ("because I can!")

    • Re:GPL DOS (Score:5, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday October 22, 2017 @04:13PM (#55414071) Homepage Journal

      So, there is now a GPL operating system that will run DOS applications. That's pretty interesting.

      You mean, besides FreeDOS?

    • Re:GPL DOS (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Sunday October 22, 2017 @04:47PM (#55414205)

      So, there is now a GPL operating system that will run DOS applications. That's pretty interesting.

      If there were still sufficient "must have" DOS applications that could benefit from a little source code tweaking ("because I can!")

      An old Ham called me up and wanted a way to run DOS on his W10 computer. He had programs he'd been using since the early 90's, his Windows 95 computer gave up the ghost, and he didn't want to change. I gave him some hints, but he didn't like it when I said the best idea was to start using software that wasn't written 30 years ago.

      • You've never heard of DosBox? It works pretty good.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by PRMan ( 959735 )
          A friend of mine does QA for machined parts for air manufacturers. When their old computer died, they started using DosBox instead. Works great.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Megol ( 3135005 )

          For what? Last time I looked it could be used for games. Some games. Often the popular ones that somebody cared enough about to write workarounds for.
          It wasn't even good at emulating hardware used by games and creativity programs (music players, graphics stuff etc.).

          Of course that was my impression from some years ago, could be better now.

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by HornWumpus ( 783565 )

            In the time it took you write that post, you could have looked.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Megol ( 3135005 )

              Sure I could. If I'd be a very slow at typing - because (as for most projects) actually getting to know the problems takes some drilling down. Most people are enthusiastic when they get some thing working and those things are easily found while people that didn't get things working either: 1) just drop the program 2) tinker a bit and try to get it working (asking questions) 3) complain loudly acting as a little child 4) complain loudly because the problems are due to to the emulator design and nobody seem t

          • For what? Last time I looked it could be used for games. Some games. Often the popular ones that somebody cared enough about to write workarounds for. It wasn't even good at emulating hardware used by games and creativity programs (music players, graphics stuff etc.).

            Of course that was my impression from some years ago, could be better now.

            Keeping in mind that this guy was trying to keep using an ancient command line design program for graphic design, and use it in all of the ways needed, like printing - which I've not seen done on DosBox - does this DOS emulator have modern printer drivers? - to me, while yes I did tell him about DosBox, The smart money was on simply jumping ahead and using a program designed for modern computers.

            It wasn't even money - He had to buy a new computer when his old one crapped out, and the people he was doing t

            • There are some DosBox forks/patches out there that enable things like parallel port passthrough... that'd be a nice one to have official support for. Seems they have a fair number of interesting builds at: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/SVN... [dosbox.com]

              • There are some DosBox forks/patches out there that enable things like parallel port passthrough... that'd be a nice one to have official support for. Seems they have a fair number of interesting builds at: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/SVN... [dosbox.com]

                It's getting pretty complex for this guy though. This whole exercise would be learning how to use DosBox, whihc he doesn't want to do, or learning a modern graphic layout program, which he doesn't want to do. I see so many red flags that tell me I'd end up owning every problem on his computer.

                Maybe he could pick up an old 286 machine at a hamfest?

          • Among other things, it can run Windows 3.1 (or 3.11, the workgroups forms, or whatever).. I'm sure that was fun to get working in the first place... but it appears to have been capable of this for ~10 years (Dosbox .70); also can run Windows 95 since version .74 (latest, 7 ya), and can at least run the Windows 98 setup program. I mention them as Windows tends to be broken in all sorts of weird and subtle ways, which is why i use them as something of a benchmark (not entirely unlike WINE being able to run Of

          • It wasn't even good at emulating hardware used by games and creativity programs (music players, graphics stuff etc.)

            Depends on the hardware.

            If it's some rare custom ISA card hardware : yes it's going to be problematic. (e.g.: some custom ISA controller used by the photo scanner of some graphics creativity program, or a custom ISA multi-channel DAC used by scientific equipment).

            If it talks to the computer using a standard way (e.g.: talks over a standard COM port, a MIDI port or - rarely back then - talks over the network using some packet driver) or if the ISA card is a common one (nearly any sound card, including Garvis

        • You've never heard of DosBox? It works pretty good.

          I've heard of many things.I was relaying the story, not my suggestions. I did suggest DosBox. He didn't like it.

          And I still stand by my recommendation that he get a computer program that isn't worthless and will run on a modern computer. His output looked like something from 30 years ago. If you are doing design with a DOS program, you get documents that look like a step above a mechanical typwriter, and you glue the pictures to the output.

          In the end, I think what he was really looking for was an old

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • WendesDOS (Score:3)

    by jlowery ( 47102 ) on Sunday October 22, 2017 @04:15PM (#55414085)

    I vaguely remember a similar operating system, written by brothers Wendes. As I recall, Microsoft quickly bought them out and employed them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tbuskey ( 135499 )

      WendinDos. I had a demo floppy for it. Multitasking DOS done well.

      When MS bought them, they buried it. :-(

  • Worked great in an office setting (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22, 2017 @04:16PM (#55414087)

    I loved PC-MOS/386 "back in the day" -- way back in the day. Even visited their headquarters at one point and attempted to get a dev job at one point.

    My employer who sold software for trucking companies used it as the cheapest alternative for small office settings where several dispatchers shared one beefy (for the time) computer with cheap terminals attached.

    It really was remarkable for the time how they made DOS multi-user.

    • You were the ONE that got it to work? I wasted most of a month before returning it as useless, overpriced, broken, misdocumented junk.

      Also only made financial sense if you already owned the terminals. We were trying to use it as a dial-in host. Impossible to make it work with modems that generated more the 16 bytes of traffic per time slice, which wasn't documented. Just terrible.

  • Many years ago Apple sold a device with a custom OS called the Newton. Apple sold Newtons for about 5 years (1993-1998) but never released the OS under a free software license. Today some users still own, repair, and use Newtons but they do so with no respect for their software freedom. Whatever problems Apple built into the Newton's software (whether on-purpose or accidentally) cannot be fixed by its users no matter how technically skilled or willing those users are.

    PC-MOS/386 currently requires a nonfree compiler (the Borland compiler) but now that PC-MOS/386 is free software it can be ported to systems so it will compile with free software compilers, thus avoiding the problem of free software with nonfree dependencies (what was originally known as "The Java Trap [gnu.org]" named after free Java programs that depended on Sun's formerly nonfree Java software). We went from having no software freedom with PC-MOS/386 to being free to port and improve PC-MOS/386 as we wish! So PC-MOS/386 now that it has been released as free software treats you better than Apple treats Newton users. Thanks PC-MOS/386 developers for respecting our software freedom!

    • Whatever problems Apple built into the Newton's software (whether on-purpose or accidentally) cannot be fixed by its users no matter how technically skilled or willing those users are.

      You say that, but I don't know that it's true. It's not like they did anything to prevent you from replacing components, like signing code. Long before there was a source code leak, people were replacing portions of the AmigaOS with workalikes. Major portions of the OS, too, like the graphics library. There were also patches to system libraries to change their function. So no, I think if those users were more technically skilled, they could fix the problems with the Newton OS.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbn-o ( 555068 )

        What you described doesn't grant them complete source code access to the code they already have, nor does it grant them license to share, inspect, or modify said source code. So it's not the same as having software freedom which is what we see with PC-MOS/386. What you're describing is reverse engineering and replacing software components at best, a violation of the proprietary license at worst, and not respecting the user's software freedom either way.

        • What you're describing is reverse engineering and replacing software components at best, a violation of the proprietary license at worst,

          Reverse engineering, at least in the USA, is explicitly protected when carried out for the purpose of interoperability.

          and not respecting the user's software freedom either way.

          Users that care about software freedom don't give money to Apple in the first place.

            • Here we are talking about how you can't get OS source code, and you post a link which still doesn't contain the OS source code. It's almost like you aren't actually reading what's being written, but your knee jerked when you heard something bad about Apple and you just had to shit out a meaningless pro-Apple comment.

              Sure, Apple has opened some stuff. Stuff that they didn't have the skills to maintain on their own, like llvm. Get back to me when they release complete OS sources. Until then, they're no differ

              • They still release a hell of a lot more code than Microsoft does. The whole kernel is open source, unlike Microsoft. In fact, that page from Apple is much more descriptive than the same one from M$... https://open.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com]

    • Oh my gosh... I had lived most of my life without any regrets whatsoever. Now that I know about the tragedy of Apple Newton not having free software, it will haunt me to my dying day, being the biggest regret I will lament upon my death bed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

      The old Borland compilers may not be libre, but they were made freely available over a decade ago.

      http://edn.embarcadero.com/art... [embarcadero.com]

  • Sounds like a great candidate for a talk at FOSDEM 2018 Retrocomputing DevRoom. Call for Participation here:
    https://lists.fosdem.org/piper... [fosdem.org]

  • Reboot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thereitis ( 2355426 ) on Sunday October 22, 2017 @04:31PM (#55414139) Journal

    "One does not simply reboot" [github.com] - Boromir

    Sometimes I actually miss the complexity of assembler. Or maybe I just hate the 12 layers of abstraction that encompasses so many things these days. In a way it's not complexity of assembler I miss: it's the simplicity of knowing exactly what the computer is going to do.

  • Like the "Prince of Persia" code release, I'm not at all sure of the point of a release of assembler-heavy code.

    Pretty much, you could get that from a disassembler just run on the same programs if you desperately needed to know what it did. Sure, legality and all, but is anyone really watching out for people reverse-engineering 20-year-old OS?

    As someone who was familiar with 8086 asm and things like Ralf Brown's Interrupt List, I have written any number of things using exactly this kind of code. And I cou

    • The recipe for 'Cicero Rye' died with the baker about 25 years ago.

      It was _great_ bread, there are websites dedicated to recreating/finding the recipe. The widow was offered five figures, but didn't know it.

      But PC-MOS is more like a recipe for wonder bread. (Astroglide is the secret ingredient, same as for McNuggets.)

      • Mod me funny?

        Learn and cry. Silicon oil (astroglide) IS the secret ingredient in almost all prepared frozen foods. Keeps them moist.

        I bet it's too expensive to put in wonder bread though.

        The correct moderation for this and parent post is 'offtopic'. Mods, please fix.

        • OnTopic.

          Not sure how much astroglide in PC-MOS, more than zero. Could have used more. It WAS painful.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Besides learning about DOS stuff, many of these games use many tricks to optimize the games which not necessarily the code but the thinking processes could be useful even in modern languages.

      The other thing is legally, now it's open, if you happen to have used code that looks similar to the original, or some idiot actually plagiarized it, which wouldn't be necessarily unusual, there is no current or future rights holder (another SCO) that can claim ownership to the code.

  • DOS is not done, till Lotus won't run, right?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by acvh ( 120205 )

      DOS is not done, till Lotus won't run, right?
      this brings back memories of working at The Computer Factory back in 1990. as I recall, we also had to replace (not flash, pull and insert) the BIOS on a bunch of NEC PCs because they wouldn't run 1-2-3.

      it was the era where Excel came with a runtime version of Windows because businesses didn't run Windows yet.

      now get off my lawn

  • Didn't Windows386 run on top of this?

    For those unaware before NT hit Microsoft experimented with a non neutered version of Windows that didn't run on top of DOS. WIndows386 could run some legacy DOS apps and Win16 apps but required an expensive 386 with up to 2 whole megs of pricey ram.

    The idea and even some of the code made it to WindowsNT 3.1 and probably OS/2 as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lproven ( 6030 )

      No, not really.

      Windows/386 was a thing. It was the 386-specific version of Winows 2. It still ran on top of DOS, it just used the 386's Virtual8086 mode for better, hardware-assisted multitasking. It ran anything Windows 2 ran.

      Windows 3 merged the separate 8088/8086, 80286 & 80386 versions of Windows 2 into a single combined binary, with a clever mode-switcher to pick the appropriate one, slapped the GUI, fonts & 3D-shaded widgets from from OS/2 1.2 on it... and made MS wealthy.

    • I'm curious to know where this (mis)information originates.

  • back in the day (Score:5, Informative)

    by spaceman375 ( 780812 ) on Sunday October 22, 2017 @05:21PM (#55414313)

    As long as we are indulging in retro-praise...

    I was really impressed with an OS named Pick. It was essentially a database, but a plain 286 with 2 megs of RAM could run 10 terminals and four printers while doing a tape backup with no lag. Mind you, all it did was ascii; no graphics or sound. But the concept was impressive: Since nobody could make a CPU as complex as they needed, under the OS was less than 100k that emulated a more complex CPU, and the OS itself was written in assembler for that virtual CPU. Pick was actually the first OS to run on the original RISC processor from IBM because that virtual CPU was so close to the real hardware 20 years later. When IBM wanted an OS for the first PC they tried to get Pick before DOS. The owner was hanging upside down in gravity boots when he laughed at them because he said it was too complex to run on their weak hardware. What can you expect from a guy named Dick Pick? True story, but I loved that stupid OS.

    • You could do some impressive stuff with PICK, with just a knowledge of BASIC.

    • I still have an Altos 586 [wikipedia.org]. It's an 8086 box that runs Microsoft Xenix (from before they sold it off to create SCO). It's an 8086-based machine with 512k of RAM, a 10MB hard drive, and it has 5 RS-232 ports so five users can be logged in simultaneous on the Xenix system, which is a port of Series 3 UNIX that Microsoft produced. Yes, Microsoft was a UNIX software vendor back in the day.

      Five concurrent users on an 8086 processor with 512K of RAM. From Microsoft. With dazzling hardware designed by Altos, o

      • ... so five users can be logged in simultaneous on the Xenix system, which is a port of Series 3 UNIX that Microsoft produced. Yes, Microsoft was a UNIX software vendor back in the day.

        Five concurrent users on an 8086 processor with 512K of RAM. From Microsoft. With dazzling hardware designed by Altos, of course.

        IIRC, MicroSoft was in fact the largest UNIX vendor of the day. This was a time when AT&T had only just come out of their consent decree preventing them selling UNIX, the likes of SUN and SGI were minnow start ups, and HP/IBM had a myriad of other proprietary cash-cow OSes already.

        I remember being pretty impressed on a university open day at one of the labs being run on a single Xenix PC, with maybe 20 terminals attached. Probably not a 8086 PC, mind, this was 1993, but probably nothing more powerful th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I still have an Altos 586. It's an 8086 box that runs Microsoft Xenix (from before they sold it off to create SCO). It's an 8086-based machine with 512k of RAM, a 10MB hard drive, and it has 5 RS-232 ports so five users can be logged in simultaneous on the Xenix system, which is a port of Series 3 UNIX that Microsoft produced. Yes, Microsoft was a UNIX software vendor back in the day.

        Five concurrent users on an 8086 processor with 512K of RAM. From Microsoft. With dazzling hardware designed by Altos, of cou

        • CP/M for 16 bit machines wasn't just announced. CP/M-86 was one of the operating systems that was complete and available to purchase from IBM to run on the original IBM PC. It continued to exist for awhile after release, in fact. There were mutliple OSes available to run on the IBM PC.

          The IBM PC could even be used without any OS at all. It had a Microsoft-produced BASIC interpreter in ROM. Any 8088-generation IBM-PC will boot into the BASIC interpreter prompt after a delay, if it finds no bootable OS,

    • Rather than burn a mod point, let me just add a kudo to your comment. Pick was probably the finest OS ever created: intimately tied with a real database; amazingly efficient and effective; totally dedicated to things just working solidly... Having gone through everything from DG's RDOS and AOS through TI's DX-10 and DNOS, then various UNIX flavors and Linux (what I'm currently running), it was the BEST! Damn - if only we could open-source Pick....
    • In the future, you should mention Dick Pick much sooner in the story.

    • You do know it's still very popular, right? If you want to work with it a lot of vertical market software companies are desperately trying to get away from it.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Look for products based on "universe" or "unidata" or "unibase".

  • The x86 task shared, the Amiga Multitask'd.

    • I first encountered PC-MOS in 1991 or so. I was repairing a computer for a customer and it was installed on his machine. I asked him what it was, and he said "it's a multi-user Disk Operating system."

      "How would that work?" I wondered. There is only one keyboard and one monitor.

      • I first encountered PC-MOS in 1991 or so. I was repairing a computer for a customer and it was installed on his machine. I asked him what it was, and he said "it's a multi-user Disk Operating system."

        "How would that work?" I wondered. There is only one keyboard and one monitor.

        Ah darn, I read Multitasking, it would only be normal.

        I had a friend who was all about Sparc stations they were a multi-user system. It wasn't working right if it didn't have network access, this well before WWW.

        • I had a friend who was all about Sparc stations they were a multi-user system. It wasn't working right if it didn't have network access, this well before WWW.

          Sun networks of yesteryear overwhelmingly used yp ("yellow pages"), a system for distributed flat database files. Instead of just having a local passwd file, you'd have a networked one. Same for the hosts file, and some others. Even relatively late versions of SunOS for the x86 didn't even come with DNS resolution enabled; you had to actually re-link a system library (libc? I forget) to do DNS resolution, because internet access was less common than an internal network based on yp.) I had to do this on my 3

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Whew, just in time....a useless 30-year old OS that likely won't run on anything.

    Now what?

  • Can someone track OS/2's source code? It seems that IBM misplaced it ;)

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