Microsoft is continuing its efforts to release early versions of DOS as open source, and today we’ve got a special one.
We’re stoked today to showcase some newly available source code materials that provide an even earlier look into the development of PC-DOS 1.00, the first release of DOS for the IBM PC. A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini has worked to locate, scan, and transcribe the stack of DOS-era source listings from Tim Paterson, the author of DOS.
The listings include sources to the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, and some well-known utilities such as CHKDSK. Not only were these assembler listings, but there were also listings of the assembler itself! This work offers rare insight into how MS-DOS/PC-DOS came to be, and how operating system development was done at the time, not as it was later reconstructed.
↫ Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman
It’s wild that the source code had to be transcribed from paper, including notes and changes. You can find more information about the process on Gao’s website and Cini’s website.
Scott is a very good “ambassador” at Microsoft. I don’t know what his title is, but he is the one that pushed for .Net becoming open source and reaches out with these kinds of projects.
It is nice to see there are some teams over there really invested in being “librarians” of computer history. Wish more companies have teams dedicated to this.
Hanselman is a VP of something these days but he is still basically an end-user advocate. I agree, he has had a very positive impact on Microsoft. It seems he is pushing back against mandatory microsoft accounts for local login as well. Good to see him with more seniority.
LeFantome,
I always imagine there are thousands of employees who try to advocate for end users in all the giant tech companies, be it microsoft, apple, google, etc. It’s good to have these employees pushing back against the worst corporate impulses, but when executive pay is tied to stock price, I think they’re fighting against impossibly strong currents.
Alfman,
There would be exceptions of course.
But in general I see engineers would push for positive change. How much they have a say differs, though.
The unfortunate reality is that many engineering led companies (like Boeing, or Google) over time became finance / suits led companies, which changed their culture.
LeFantome,
I had the chance to meet him in person during some tech events. He seemed like a genuine guy, not a “public face” some companies artificially push.
Of course I cannot know for certain how much sway he would have in these decisions. But it is nice to have people like them in large companies.
Less than 4k lines of assembly code…wow that’s nothing.
Then again, I think IBM PCs were sold with 64k of RAM so the OS had to be slim!
The 8088 had 20 bit addressing for 1MB support, but this had to be shared with BIOS, video memory and was probably unobtainium in 1980, haha. Now 8GB is considered low end and my home computer has a million times more ram!
My fondest memories are of DOS 3.3 and DOS 5.0. Both 4.0 and 6+ seemed worse so I guess the “every other version” rule worked for Microsoft back then as well. I would love to see either of those released as Open Source. DOS 5.0 was the version baked into OS/2 as well (and still is in ArcaOS I imagine).
Sorry, it’s a bit off topic.
Going open source is not always a good thing, this very week I had an example of that with Warp. I’ve been playing with Warp for a while now, trying to work out if a paid subscription is worthwhile or not. Warp went fully open source a week or so back, and the very next build broke it on every platform I was testing, Mac, Windows and several versions of Linux. Coincidence, teething issue or inevitability?
Sometimes we just need the legacy preserved, warts and all, without the improvements, of course I’m making the assumption that someone somewhere will decide it’s time to make an uninformed “improvement”!
I used to hand write my programs on paper as late as in the mid 90’s, and there was nothing wild about this.