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How Not to Release Historic Source Code
This is how to not do it: Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely brilliant that Microsoft was able to release a fairly complete (minus DOSSHELL) source code for MS-DOS 4.00 or 4.01 (see below). As much as it was hated, DOS 4.0 was an important milestone and DOS 5.0 was much more similar to DOS 4.0 than not.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely brilliant that Microsoft was able to release a fairly complete (minus DOSSHELL) source code for MS-DOS 4.00 or 4.01 (see below). This blunder is all the more regrettable because similar problems affected the previous GW-BASIC source release(very old MASM versions cannot deal with UNIX style line endings). Historic source code should be released simply as an archive of files, ZIP or tar or 7z or whatever, with all timestamps preserved and every single byte kept the way it was.
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