Anyone trying to disassemble the PC DOS 1.1 boot sector soon notices that at offsets 1A3h through 1BEh there is a byte sequence that just does not belong. It appears to be a fragment of code, but it has no purpose in the boot sector and is never executed. So why is the sequence of junk bytes there, and where did it come from?
The immediate answer is “it came from FORMAT.COM”. The junk is copied verbatim from FORMAT.COM to the boot sector. But those junk bytes are not part of FORMAT.COM, either. So the question merely shifts to “why are the junk bytes in FORMAT.COM, and where did they come from?”
It is not known if anyone answered the question in the past, but the answer has been found now, almost 40 years later—twice independently.
This kind of digital archeology is deeply fascinating.
When did anyone last use DOS 1.1? I’m amazed that people would care about this oddity of an early 80s version of a defunct OS in 2021.
Very few people ever used it; DOS 1.x didn’t support hard drives or directories, it was before the PC became mainstream.
This is obviously all about historical research and examining the evolution that brought us to the present. Interest in DOS 1.1 increased, IMO, now it’s open sourced under an MIT license, which is encouraging/facilitating this type of examination. Personally I wish this happened much more often – once something is commercially defunct there’s no good reason to keep it secret.
I think I used DOS 1.1 years ago during an internship. DOS 2.x was being released at the time. That or one of the staff had just got a book on DOS 2.x, or both.
He also had a pair of binoculars for oggling women on a window ledge overlooking a bus stop. That would get him fired today. What one of the managers was caught saying? Oh my life. Him being sued today for that would sting.
As for college there were only three women on the computing course out of around 40-60 in total. If I lived my life again I’d never do computing. Ghastly experience if I stop and think about it.
You’re doing a great job there in encouraging more women into the field of computing, to correct the gender equality in the field.
Que in the NSA.
Waiting for the evolutionary step to get rid of clickbait and simply providing answers in the leading text.