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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: 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.