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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: 1) by Acabatag on Tuesday October 02 2018, @12:38AM
My formal electronics training was on 6800 hardware. I was relived to be able to go home to a Z80, actually.
Albeit, with the growth of 16 bits and beyond, the Motorola stuff was good, and sure scaled out nicer than anything else of the era. It's a shame what ended up happening to Motorola the Semiconductor company. They should have been allowed to keep the name. Same is true of H-P and other legendary ancient tech brands, though.
I can still build a 6821 into a project if I want, I suppose. Or a 6845 if I want to be really vintage with those little cube CRT displays over on the shelf (like the ones often paired to an Apple I).