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Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”

arstechnica.com

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Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”

#111

Post by ndiddy »

GaryBluto wrote: post #27
userbinator wrote: post #4

I wonder how long it'll be before they release the source for the earliest Windows versions. The fact that they still have the source for this very old DOS at least gives hope that they also do for old Windows.

The day they would make Windows 2000 codebase open source (or source available) would be the day I could die happy (although I'd probably be long dead anyways by the time there's a glimmerof chance of it happening). What a beautiful, smooth-running operating system it was.

They will never release the code for anything that new because at that point, there's tons of licensed third-party code and the codebase is so large that going through everything to verify ownership would not be feasible. The code to NT 4 and XP have been leaked though.

Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”

#112

Post by acomjean »

Interesting story of how MS got into the operating system business. IBM wanted the CPM operating system, but Digital Research wouldn’t sign ibms NDA… really a pivot point in computing history.

From “Triumph of the Nerds” tv transcript:

https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html

Jack Sams (IBM) was looking for a package from Microsoft containing both the BASIC computer language and an Operating System. But IBM hadn't done their homework.

Steve Ballmer: They thought we had an operating system. Because we had this Soft Card product that had CPM on it, they thought we could licence them CPM for this new personal computer they told us they wanted to do, and we said well, no, we're not in that business.

Jack Sams (IBM); When we discovered we didn't have - he didn't have the rights to do that and that it was not...he said but I think it's ready, I think that Gary's got it ready to go. So I said well, there's no time like the present, call up Gary.

Steve Ballmer: And so Bill right there with them in the room called Gary Kildall at Digital Research and said Gary, I'm sending some guys down…. Treat them right, they're important guys.

Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”

#113

Post by ndiddy »

FarmerPotato wrote: post #24
locusofself wrote: post #10

wow, they had to OCR it back in from paper printouts > This source code is old enough that it hadn’t been stored digitally. “A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini,” calling itself the “DOS Disassembly Group,” painstakingly transcribed and scanned in code from paper printouts provided by Paterson. This process was made even more difficult because modern OCR software strugg…

I'd like to hear more about what works in OCR of dot-matrix fonts. I've been able to OCR letter-quality printer output to 97% (mostly Os and Xs problems). But it seems that machine-learning text-recognition is also now biased to reject computer code because it doesn't look like human language.

There's a writeup here from one of the people on the team about the work it took to go from the listings to source code. http://cini.classiccmp.org/recoveryblog.htm

> With less-than-satisfactory OCR output, I resorted to a process I used many years ago when converting scans made of old Commodore ROM dumps printed on a Commodore 1515 dot-matrix printer. The process relies on the ASCII OCR output having the same repetitive errors. "B" and "8", "S" and "5" are good examples, as are "l" and "1", and "O" and "0". There are many other similar single-character errors and, when working with x86 code, there are similar errors with instructions like "MOV". This process naturally works better if the output file is monolithic rather than single-page OCR conversions because you can do substitutions across the entire converted printout and not 75 separate files.

> The next formatting hassle was the spacing. This required repetitive substitutions of a descending numbers of spaces to tabs (i.e., replace 8 spaces with a tab, 7, 6, etc.). Then if you want to return it to fixed spaces (which is likely how the original printer printed it -- spaces and not vertical tabs), you can. For pure re-creation work, spaces produce absolute column formatting while tabs can move around depending on the program displaying the file.

> Once you run thought the 15 or so common global substitutions and tab conversion, it's a lot easier to work with the file to fix formatting and perform other cleanup. This is then followed by a line-by-line comparison against the original printouts. Overall I'd say the conversion output quality with this method is very good.

Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”

#114

Post by bragr »

acomjean wrote: post #112

Interesting story of how MS got into the operating system business. IBM wanted the CPM operating system, but Digital Research wouldn’t sign ibms NDA… really a pivot point in computing history. From “Triumph of the Nerds” tv transcript: https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html Jack Sams (IBM) was looking for a package from Microsoft containing both the BASIC computer language and an Operating System. But IBM hadn't done t…

Eh, basically all facts in this story are disputed by all sides. Aside from general gist that there was some meeting that didn't go well.

Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”

#115

Post by goodpoint »

teamsolid wrote: post #5

It is wonderful how early years of modern computing was brilliant. We treated machines as they really are: machines. Performance, creativity, science..., all possible to make a 386 machine work. Nowadays is all about libraries, virtualization, [bad] code over [bad] code over [bad] code..., I dont like it.

DOS and brilliant in the same sentence...

Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”

#116

Post by 9dev »

At some point, we'll probably have a new field in history for digital archeology, and I'm really envious for those future historians! They'll be getting to sleuth around old datasets, trying to reconstruct the history of computing, understand long-forgotten file formats to preserve data, use statistical methods to analyse binary backups, and trace for specific documentation versions to crack old encryption formats...

Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”

#117

Post by chuckadams »

bragr wrote: post #114
acomjean wrote: post #112

Interesting story of how MS got into the operating system business. IBM wanted the CPM operating system, but Digital Research wouldn’t sign ibms NDA… really a pivot point in computing history. From “Triumph of the Nerds” tv transcript: https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html Jack Sams (IBM) was looking for a package from Microsoft containing both the BASIC computer language and an Operating System. But IBM hadn't done t…

Eh, basically all facts in this story are disputed by all sides. Aside from general gist that there was some meeting that didn't go well.

Whether Kildall actually blew IBM off at that meeting or not, what was definitely the case was that CP/M didn't have a 16-bit version ready to meet IBM's schedule, and that's what ultimately took them out of the running.

Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”

#118

Post by chuckadams »

greenbit wrote: post #100
GaryBluto wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The day they would make Windows 2000 codebase open source (or source available) would be the day I could die happy (although I'd probably be long dead anyways by the time there's a glimmerof chance of it happening). What a beautiful, smooth-running operating system it was.

Except for "the hive". Remember the hive? Sort of an alternate registry, in addition to the actual registry. Granted, it was pretty invisible, until it got corrupted. I had a win2k machine that was my daily (at home) that was fine until idk about 2006, at which point something happened (muons?) and it would go into some kind of panic state just after bringing up the desktop. Hive corruption. I tried on and off for a…

The registry is a collection of individual database files known as hives.

Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”

#119

Post by BobbyTables2 »

vee-kay wrote: post #52
jmward01 wrote: post #23

It is rare that I say this but, thanks MS! Arguably just as, if not more, important is the BASIC that they wrote. That was what they actually wanted to do. DOS just got them the contract with IBM. For decades MS was really a developer tools company with a side biz of writing operating systems and other misc software. They also open sourced that BASIC code too [1]. [1] https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/03/…

What's interesting is that Microsoft BASIC itself was derived from BASIC-PLUS which itself was derived from Dartmouth BASIC (which evolved into a structured programming language called SBASIC (Structured BASIC). But the popularity of Microsoft BASIC, actually halted the standardisation of SBASIC as an ANSI standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft…

Ah, the good ol’ “Embrace, Extend, … Extinguish”

Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”

#120

Post by BobbyTables2 »

curiousObject wrote: post #94
nananana9 wrote: post #75

I cannot describe to you how jealous I am of the fact that back then writing a few thousand lines of assembly was what it took to launch a successful software company.

> writing a few thousand lines of assembly was what it took to launch a successful software company. Yes, but that assembly was not DOS, and it wasn’t easy. Microsoft purchased the DOS code, they didn’t write it. Of course, they did develop and modify DOS. But that was a clever (and lucky) business deal, not a technological accomplishment. The real beginning of Microsoft was earlier, with Allen, Gates and Davidoff wr…

Imagine if the University had sued for their share of the IP and that was created using their resources…

It’s funny because I thought Jobs/Wozinak got their initial funding from selling phreaking boxes. And more recently, Anthropic engaged in criminal copyright violations with only a slap on the wrist.

Feels like a common theme of every “great” company having its origins from a “boost” resulting from criminal activity. (After all, that’s where the money is!)

Just imagine the criminal penalties possible for pirating and selling one copy of a movie or making one long distance phone call with phreaking.

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