Kinda the same, but for me, it was more of a gaming-driven motive. I learnt the basic DOS commands my observing my cousin, so I could run Prince of Persia, GORILLA.BAS, Dangerous Dave etc, even when he wasn't around (it was his 286).

Later on, when I got my own PC (a 486) I got into scripting by customising my AUTOEXEC.BAT to display a menu so I can jump into my favourite game immediately after the PC booted. Of course, I also learnt about TSRs, conventional memory, tuning CONFIG.SYS etc just so that I can run some tricky games like BioMenace and OMF2097.

I event learnt basic networking and made my own null-modem cable, because I wanted to play OMF2097 with my friends without sharing the same keyboard (we would always fight over who gets to use the right side of the keyboard, which was obviously the best side).

The first time I dealt with a virus was when I tried installing Prince of Persia 2 from a set of floppies I got from my friend. Dealing with the virus (it was one that "melted" the screen) unlocked a whole new world of malware research for me - and collecting malware became one of my hobbies. I also learnt hex editing and some assembly language because I wanted to cheat in Prince of Persia 2, and unlock shareware programs like Cheat Machine - and what I saw within the hex code of Cheat Machine blew me away, it opened another new world for me.

I built my first PC (a PIII 450, along with my first GPU - an nVidia RIVA TNT) - all parts carefully selected, so that I can play games with the best performance for the price.

In the Windows world, I was endlessly tuning my PC, diving into the registry, switching kernels (yes, there were thirdparty kernels you could install), even optimising file layout on the disk - all so that I could get the best gaming performance. I dived deep into scripting with AutoHotkey and Perl to make macros, bots and other random utilities for the games I played. After that I.. well, I could go on, but you get the picture.

So while DOS was my starting point (and a most fond memory), it was ultimately gaming that I owe my career to.

Yep, I once made a good living getting drivers into high memory and making those menus in config.sys. Installing network drivers and Netware client. People were quite happy to see me when I arrived.

For some reason I thought DOS had already been opened.

Totally, my first revision control system was unwittingly developed by me as a kid to keep progressive backups of my simcity cities.

“Everything I ever needed to know about IT, I learned installing Warcraft 2 on DOS”

The main issue for open-sourcing old software is copyright. Not all companies buy the copyright of the tools and libraries they incorporate in their software, making it difficult, if not impossible, to open source them.

Also, getting the source code for external libraries was not common until open source became the norm. Making something open-source often requires rewriting parts of it.

If win2000 got updated by the community with improved driver support people might actually prefer it to current Windows, which would be humiliating.

What do you mean by this? Have the DOS features inside of templeos?

I am thinking about how hard it'd be to port this to risc-v and then run it on an FPGA dev board as real computer. That could be fun