In a surprise move, Microsoft opens up the source to MS-DOS & Word for Windows.

I couldn’t believe it!  You can find the official announcement here.

So this is MS-DOS 1.1 & 2.0 source code.  Pitty it’s not 3.x but heck, it’s a start!

Also the Word in question is 1.1a however it does seem to include the OS/2 bits which was a big surprise.

I haven’t tried to build any of it, as I just got up but I know what I’ll be doing today!

8 thoughts on “In a surprise move, Microsoft opens up the source to MS-DOS & Word for Windows.

  1. neat! wonder if someone will try to port it to 32-bit windows?

    also, no mac source release? that was a very influential version of word. i heard also that some people at ms labs ported that mac word 5.1 to carbon, does that still exist or is my mind playing tricks?

    • Well this version of Word, is the first and last to support OS/2, which is kind of funny how that snuck in there!

      Sadly you cannot distribute your modifications, but I don’t see any restriction about redistributing your patches…..

  2. Opening the Word for DOS source folder and finding cat, (e|f|v|)*grep.exe, rm.exe, sed.exe, sort.exe, touch.exe… was kinda suprising.

    • As I was reading through some of this material some days ago I saw several references to how Word (and some other applications) were actually developed on Unix (on a PDP-11 IIRC). So finding typical Unix tools there isn’t maybe so surprising.

      • It would sound right, they did have Xenix on the PDP-11’s and I think they did on the VAX as well… Although I doubt either of those went outside of MS. There is some horror story of having to learn to use vi in order to get time off..

        And before Exchange server, MS ran some internal mail system on Xenix that was pretty full featured although they never sold it.

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