For a moment I thought it might be XP, and Microsoft were hoping that the community would pick it up to fix any security holes that are found after April 8th.
As WinXP death looms, Microsoft releases its operating system SOURCE CODE for free
Retro-computing fans got a treat on Tuesday when Microsoft donated the source code of MS DOS 1.1 and 2 to the Computer History Museum (CHM), along with the first version of Word for Windows. "Version 1.1 fits an entire operating system – limited as it was – into only 12KB of memory, which is tiny compared to today's software …
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 05:57 GMT Christian Berger
Re: Are you insane?
Actually people would stop using the newer systems after Windows XP was open sourced. After all open sourcing would mean that it's going to get a thorough cleanup while still making it compatible.
Just imagine an operating system 100% compatible with Windows, but without all the useless crap added in the newer versions?
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 07:54 GMT Lusty
Re: Are you insane?
"Actually people would stop using the newer systems after Windows XP was open sourced. After all open sourcing would mean that it's going to get a thorough cleanup while still making it compatible."
Rubbish, the first 10 years of effort would be retrofitting some kind of skinning, then the community would start work on four hundred Notepad replacements...
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 14:20 GMT Mark .
Re: Are you insane?
And we can look forward to releases every six months, with major annoying changes far more frequent than the long periods of Windows, and a much shorter period of support forcing us to upgrade. If we're lucky, the new version won't black screen on boot, and we won't have to spend ages editing graphics card config files to get it working again.
(I use and like Ubuntu, but I find it odd that the criticisms to Windows here apply far more to distributions like Ubuntu.)
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 18:13 GMT Christian Berger
Re: Are you insane?
"Rubbish, the first 10 years of effort would be retrofitting some kind of skinning, then the community would start work on four hundred Notepad replacements..."
The Windows fanboy community probably has a head start on it. I'm sure there are _way_ more than four hundred Notepad replacements, and skinning already was a feature of Windows XP.
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 11:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Are you insane?
100% compatibile with which version of Windows? The newer versions has a lot of kernel changes and optimizations for newer hardware - multicored CPUs, virtualization support, large memory address spaces, high speed PCIe buses, MSI interrupts, SSD disks, etc etc. - and introduced newer APIs to support new features. But of course many "experts" here can't see beyond the GUI... when they hear the word "interrupt" they think about a birth-control method...
Do you believe a 100% XP compatible OS would be interesting but for very low-end users who still want to run a thirteen years old operating system on old hardware? Why not run Windows 3.1 or MS DOS 5.0, then?
I have no interest in writing software that can't take advantage of actual hardware features and power - and we're dropping XP support as well, it will allow us to write better software.
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 12:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Are you insane?
>I have no interest in writing software that can't take advantage of actual hardware features
>and power - and we're dropping XP support as well, it will allow us to write better software.
Err, what? Unless you're writing to the metal for some game engine or highly optimised DB , then API changes aside your code should be hardware agnostic. Its the OS that worries for example about which CPU core to use or how to best buffer the data to the disk and when , not you.
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 13:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Are you insane?
It's clear you don't know what there's new in 7 and 8 at the API level. I'd suggest you to read the relevant documentation, because it's too long to write it here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh920512(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh920510(v=vs.85).aspx
It's pretty clear that many "experts" here still think Windows is a GUI only and not a whole operating system. Even if you don't write games engines or DBs, these new APIs:
Processes and threads: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd405527(v=vs.85).aspx
Services: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd405528(v=vs.85).aspx
Synchronization: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd405529(v=vs.85).aspx
Help you to write better highly parallel and scalable software. Of course if you just write "web applications" only in javascript all these doesn't apply to you, somebody else is already taking care of it for you.
I guess I will see more downvoters here, because being shown their ignorance will sting them.
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 14:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Are you insane?
No, the problem here is when you point out that 7 and 8 have many improvements over XP you get automatically downvoted by Linux smart*ss as you call it, who are afraid they can no longer compare their shiny latest distros with a thirteen years old OS and have to face what new Windows releases are capable of - no matter if the Metro GUI is awful or not.
Otherwise I can't understand why you get downvoted if you simply point out (and also add sources) that of course 7 and 8 supports hardware that was not available when XP was released, and of course see improvements in their features and APIs as well - everything chages with time and I guess latest Linux kernels are far better and improved over kernels of five or ten years ago - would you run your latest hardware using a very old kernel?
But I would never think that downvoting someone telling what new features the latest kernel have is "cool" because I need to feel superior. Is juvenile and rude showing someone else pure ignorance and prejudices? Or is juvenile and rude being full of ignorance and prejudices?
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 22:27 GMT F Seiler
Re: Are you insane?
I'm not going to vote either way, but think the "synchronization" list filled with functions that deal within the same process. As such they better not actually switch to kernel mode to do their magic and thus can be implemented by anyone else without additional win API support. I prefer to use the C++ language features (where available, and newer versions really add a lot of useful stuff in that regard) than bolting myself onto the win API very firmly. Of course MS's stdlib may or may not use the win API calls under the hood. Or the win API functions use their stdlib under the hood, who knows.
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 14:00 GMT Mark .
Re: Are you insane?
I agree - I not only love the history revisionism that portrays Windows XP (hated by geeks at the time) as now some golden age of Microsoft operating systems, but you have people actively wanting to run an OS targetted on machines less powerful than three year old smartphones. Apparently all those years when MS was criticised for the security model was just a joke.
Yes, it's a shame that people do have to upgrade once every 10 years even if they don't care for the new "up-front" features, and yes software companies do therefore get to earn money in return for continuing to upgrade the OS for new hardware, and fixing security issues. But personally I love living in a future where even my phone runs rings around my Windows 2000 desktop PC, let alone the hardware I have in my laptop. I wouldn't trade that just to save an upgrade fee that's required to take advantage of it, and if I was that against it, there are free operating systems that people could use and stop complaining. I'd be curious to know how many people here really are running Windows XP on their home machines, or are just Windows-critics in disguise...
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 13:44 GMT Mark .
Re: Are you insane?
But I thought XP was just 2000 with useless crap and a fisher price interface. And had huge security holes like everything being run as admin, and programs being able to write to each others' folders. Funny how its now praised as being great.
I never was much a fan of XP; it didn't offer much over 2000, and was only an improvement to those who were previously on 9x/Me. Windows 7 onwards meanwhile does have improvements under the hood, whether better support for newer hardware like SSDs, improved security model, and I like being able to launch programs by typing the name or clicking on the taskbar, rather than scrolling through a big list of every app. Anything was better than DOS or Windows 9x though.
If you don't want the extra crap, go get NT 3.5.
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Friday 28th March 2014 13:07 GMT NogginTheNog
Re: Are you insane?
"If you don't want the extra crap, go get NT 3.5"
Before Win2k you had to restart WinNT if you plugged in a network cable in order to start up the networking subsystems. And the common Type 2 printer drivers would crash the whole OS. Do you really suggest we should go back to that sort of crap??
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 18:42 GMT Primus Secundus Tertius
Re: Are you insane?
By all accounts XP was a rats' nest of bodged code. In particular, concepts of layered software were repeatedly broken in order to get a quick "solution".
That's why after about three years the developers came back to Gates to say, "sorry, old chap, we can't keep this software upright and pile ever more goodies onto it". MS has had to redevelop cleanly layered software to get to Vista and Windows 7.
So if XP were open sourced it would require an even bigger rewrite than the transition from Netscape to Firefox, another notorious example.
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 10:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Are you insane?
"Black hats would be combing it over for vulnerabilities applicable to Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 too. The community might be able to fix vulnerabilities in XP, but they definitely couldn't with the newer operating systems."
I'm not sure why people seem to be under the impression that you need the source code to find vulnerabilities. There's this old fashioned tool called a disassembler and any black or white hat worth their salt can speak assembly language. All you need is the binary. Yes, its more work but it can be done.
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Friday 28th March 2014 15:18 GMT Thomas Whipp
Re: Are you insane?
Historically MS made source code available under restricted terms. There have been documented leaks in the past. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3485545.stm]
I think its fair to assume that copies have made their way into some restricted "blackhat" groups (any government agency that *really* wants a copy for example!)
The only difference here is that its a freely available release, but as I say above - the people you'd be worried about having this will already have done so.
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Thursday 27th March 2014 05:18 GMT Michael Thibault
For a moment I thought it was definitely going to be the source for XP, and Microsoft were hoping, in releasing it, that the wide world would realise that there was no longer any hope for XP, nor any future, and that now really, really, and truly is the time to move on to absolutely anything else posthaste. IOW, releasing the XP source is the most noble thing MS could do.
Another missed opportunity.
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 02:18 GMT A J Stiles
Wordwise Plus
Wordwise Plus on the BBC. WordStar under MS-DOS. Both used a similar principle, with commands to control printing embedded right in the text. Wordwise on the BBC even used a 40-column editing mode with automatic reformatting for printing; true abstraction of presentation from content.
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Wednesday 26th March 2014 08:26 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Anybody else ever used brown-bag word processor?
I got the disk for HFL 4,- (less than 2 euro) and my wife wrote her MSc thesis on it. Simple, but it worked. I was more of a Wordstar user, as my documents (text data files from our image processing system) exceeded 64kB frequently. The column-mode editing in Wordstar was ideal for certain tricky manipulations with columns of data. I did like the first Word for Windows editions, but have switched to LaTeX since. I only ever use Word or Open/LibreOffice if I get documents from our management.
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Thursday 27th March 2014 20:36 GMT Ian 55
Borland Sprint
Emacs without the pain = the best text editor I have ever used, coupled with a formatting program that enabled you to say 'make this 13.9 pts high' (so it fits on the page) and 'include this bit of PostScript' (for the images).
You could also pull out the power plug on your PC with it running, and when you restarted, you'd have lost no more than ten seconds of work.
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Tuesday 25th March 2014 23:23 GMT Hurn
Correction
"Version 1.1 fits an entire operating system – limited as it was – into only 12KB of memory"
No, the 12KB of memory only held the "resident in memory" portion of the OS. Larger commands, which were also part of the Operating System, were loaded from storage (floppy, later HD) as needed, and then "forgotten" once done with.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
