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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 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.