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posted by CoolHand on Monday October 01 2018, @05:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-late-than-never? dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 02 2018, @07:42PM

    by Reziac (2489) on Tuesday October 02 2018, @07:42PM (#743023) Homepage

    Welcome. Didn't realise it was still so readily available; it's been [checking] 18 years since the leak. Looked to me like someone hastily packed their work partition. Should be a tish over 20mb zipped, 63mb unzipped.

    Would be nice if they'd officially release more of this old stuff, and on this generous license. Not really useful to anyone but hobbyists and maybe the odd industrial process, but still, you never know when irreplaceable source will be lost in a corporate shuffle (frex Netscape 3.0x, WordPerfect 5.1). And while I'm wishing, could we resurrect the Win9x-and-before knowledge base??

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