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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 DannyB on Tuesday October 02 2018, @06:52PM (1 child)
It wasn't Excel. It was Multiplan.
The original Mac had only 128 K. Excel didn't come out until later. When it did, it was on the Mac first. I was extremely impressed with it in 1985, IIRC.
It was Steve Jobs who would allow, and then later only reluctantly allowed expanding the Mac from 128 K to 512 K. Later up to 4 MB of memory for the extremely rich.
128K simply wasn't enough. In 512K, it was very possible to use Apple's development tools (first MacWorks, later MPW) to build Mac applications. It was after the "Fat" Mac (512K) that the Mac took off. That was even what limited Apple's own ability to deliver a lot of improvements in the system software that would be loaded into RAM to augment the ROM.
Microsoft had their own non-Apple development environment. I know little about it, but some was written about it at the time. Microsoft used a DEC to build Mac software with their own tool chain. Based on the p-System. So their source compiled to p-Code. Their apps had a p-Code interpreter in native code, and the rest of the app was byte interpreted p-Code. The efficiency of this did not surprise me one bit since my employer had been using the UCSD p-System with Pascal for a few years -- and it was very impressive what you could do in limited memory. You could put BASIC programmers to shame. Loadable and unloadable code segments was almost like having virtual memory. And unlike native code, it the system could dynamically unload code segments with code that was still active in the stack trace. When you would "return" back into a procedure in an unloaded code segment, it could be reloaded again, even at a different address. No wonder Microsoft could develop Multiplan and Word to run on a 128K Mac.
Steve Jobs is the prick that also wouldn't let the Mac have:
* a monitor separate from the computer box -- it must all be in a single box. (Note when the messiah returned to Apple, the iMac had that philosophy again -- single enclosed box, no serviceable or upgradeable parts. Ever. After all, you can just buy a new computer.)
* Color
* Slots
* Gobs of memory
* Easily upgradable memory
* Third party vendor video cards with much better capabilities
* New types of I/O devices as plug in cards.
When Steve Jobs was stripped of power, he chose to leave Apple on his own. He could have stayed, he just no longer was able to keep the Mac crippled.
That was when the Mac really took off in 1987 with the Mac II. It was as if the flood gates were opened to allow third parties to do all sorts of cool stuff. The Mac's expansion slots did not have any stupid dip switches, no interrupts to configure or puzzle over, no autoexec.bat nor config.sys. It was truly plug and play using Texas Instruments NuBus bus design. And SCSI -- truly plug and play external drives -- other than having to set a SCSI ID on devices, and plug in a terminator on the end. But compare the ease of this with the PCs of the day.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @07:09PM
Yeah Jobs seemed to love that "magical" black box approach. Maybe why he did so well selling ipods and iphones.
Supposedly Woz even had to threaten to leave Apple, thus leaving Jobs with a company with no product, during the early days. This over something as simple as expansion slots.
The Apple II, much like the Mac II, was more akin to the PC than the original Mac. And if Apple had not had engineers that was able to produce the likes of the Apple IIgs, the sale of which kept Apple going while Jobs was power tripping over the Mac, there may not have been any company around to buy Next, and thus allow a second coming of Jobs.