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Microsoft Releases Crown Jewels — From 1982!
If you look back 30 or so years ago, it wasn’t clear what was going to happen with personal computers. One thing most people would have bet on, though, was that CP/M — the operating system from Digital Research — would keep growing and power whatever new machines were available. Except it didn’t. MS-DOS took over the word and led — eventually — to the huge number of Windows computers we know today. Microsoft has released the source code to MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 on GitHub.
Microsoft — then another fledgling computer company — had written some BASIC interpreters and wanted in on the operating system space. They paid the princely sum of $75,000 to Seattle Computer Products for something called QDOS written by [Tim Paterson]. Rebranded as MS-DOS, the first version appeared in late 1981 and version 1.25 was out about a year later.
While you might not think having MS-DOS source code is a big deal, there’s still a lot of life left in DOS and it is also interesting from an educational and historical perspective. If you don’t want to read x86 assembly language, there’s also the BASIC source for the samples (paradoxically, in the bin subdirectory) along with compiled COM files for old friends like EDLIN and DEBUG.
[...] If this gets you wanting to write some new DOS programs, you can actually use GCC now. Or if you want to play the DONKEY.BAS file, QB64 would probably work.
Also at The Register.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday October 01 2018, @08:32PM (2 children)
Yup, that was atrocious. However, the greatest triumph of my early days of understanding computing had to be the time I actually fixed a problem using DEBUG.
The machine in question was a Windows 3.1 machine, and someone (quite possibly me) made the wonderfully boneheaded move of deleting CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. This of course rendered the machine immediately completely unusable, and unbootable from the hard disk. We couldn't take advantage of Norton Utilities because they were on the wrong size of floppy disk and we didn't want to wait for the mail order to go through for the new version. The solution involved reconfiguring the BIOS to boot from the 3.5" floppy drive into DOS, calculating the location of the filename directory in the FAT file system, and using DEBUG to load, hex-edit, and save the contents of the disk at that location to undo the deletion of those two critical files. It was horrendous: Every move required looking up and re-looking up every letter of every command in the paper manuals because any misstep would have made things much worse and it's not like there was any built-in help system.
And that told me all I needed to know about the fragility of early Windows.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 02 2018, @03:32AM
CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT are just textfiles. DOS will in fact run without them, as will DOS EDIT (so you can just type in a new one if need be; I've done as much for similarly-boneheaded clients), and they don't occupy any special position on the disk. Sounds like what you actually deleted were the real boot files, IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS, which did have to be located in a predictable spot (first on the disk) for the system to boot. None of which has anything to do with Win3.1x, other than being what the Windows shell ran on top of.
Still, it must have been quite the Learning Experience. :D
As to fragility, every system has vital bits you can't fuck with. I've had GRUB commit sepukku (twice) because it apparently objected to anyone looking at (not changing, just looking) Mint's video mode config doohickey. (What business that had fucking with GRUB, I never did find out.) Current linux box lately threw a rod when it didn't like a video driver update, which required sneaking in sideways to hand-edit what it broke.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by Cenan on Tuesday October 02 2018, @05:01PM
Hah! I actually learned to code by way of needing a save-me from doing dumb stuff like deleting essential files from DOS. A friend of mine had started a pet project in Pascal he called "Startup". I got him to give me the source and we spent many, many days meeting up at his place to expand on it. I'd come by with a diskette with my latest version and we'd do a poor man's diff on the sources. The later versions we created could also handle the different memory requirements of the multitude of games we pirated back than. Quarterdeck's memory manager made that all obsolete, but by then we had already learned enough.
I never did figure out how to make the program restore a broken command.com though.