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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, Informative) by SomeGuy on Monday October 01 2018, @09:23PM (1 child)
Windows NT 3.x, 4.x, 2000, XP, Vista 32-bit, 7-32 bit, 8-32bit and 10 32-bit all have a DOS virtualization layer called NTVDM. This can also run 16-bit Windows 3.x applications.
The Alpha/PPC/MIPS CPU versions of NT 3.x/4 used a CPU emulator that behaved similarly.
Also, when Windows 7 hit the market, most consumer machines sold were 32-bit. Only a couple of years later it was sort of half and half lower end 32-bit and higher end 64-bit. When the Windows 10 "upgrade" push happened, people got the same bit-ness they already had. So there are more Windows 10 32-bit versions out there than most people might think. (most that have it don't know the damn difference).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @12:25AM
That same subsystem let them have os2 1.x emulation and posix. They are now using it to emu linux.