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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 forkazoo on Tuesday October 02 2018, @02:55AM (1 child)
Even by the standards of 1981, DOS certainly wasn't a technically impressive OS. (Though fuller featured software like VMS, TOPS, and that UNIX thing couldn't yet run on the tiny micros of the era.) And a lot of people suspected that the microcomputer revolution was coming, but nobody knew exactly how or when. The actual demonstrated value of an OS for home microcomputers in 1981 was pretty limited. The market was thousands of enthusiasts, rather than millions of consumers like it would be five years later. It was a bit like investing in a web company in 1991, color television in 1948, or the home video market in the 1970's. The market in-general was clearly going to explode in the long run. The technology was going to get cheaper, more refined, and more accessible. But there wasn't yet a lot of capital flowing in from real customers. The companies doing real work didn't have a ton of cash, and the big investors has no idea who to back with Wall Street money.
So if SCP hadn't sold to Microsoft, they probably wouldn't have made millions on QDOS. It's certainly possible. But it's just as likely that they would have been just as significant a player today as they actually are, except with $75,000 less in their pockets. People assume SCP had something super valuable in the first version of DOS. In reality, it was MS that had something valuable in the social link to IBM that they could have exploited in any number of ways. (Buy a different OS, hire somebody to write something quickly, etc.)
In 1981, the smart money was on Pascal/Z-Code for the PC because that had the smart migration path for a bunch of existing software to the smaller systems. But that effort is even more forgotten that SCP!
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday October 02 2018, @12:43PM
Even Microsoft knew that DOS was crap, and only a stop-gap to get their foot into the door of a partnership with IBM. It was really a bare application launcher and disk handler, with a few crude utilities like EDLIN thrown in. MS at that time, Ironically, believed that UNIX ws the future so they licenced it from AT&T and packaged it as Xenix. MS continued to develop Xenix as they knew (as everyone did) that with the rate of improvement of PCs they would soon be powerful enough to run UNIX, and DOS could be dropped.
This future with Xenix was undermined by the fact that users (and app devleopers) became wedded to DOS. Xenix was dropped around 1987 and instead MS partnered with IBM to create OS/2 as DOS's successor, thinking that IBM's weight in the corporate sector should ensure its success. Meanwhile Windows, originally just a graphical shell running on DOS (so those DOS apps could still be run), was growing into a commercial success. Then MS lost patience with IBM wasting huge amounts of time trying to get OS/2 to run on 80286 processors (which soon vanished from the scene anyway). So ultimately MS dropped OS/2 and poached the VMS team from DEC to write Windows NT instead as the true DOS successor.
You could say MS never wrote an OS from scratch. They bought DOS from SCP (its author came too), and WinNT was written by a team recruited from DEC, who probably brought VMS code with them, if only in their heads.