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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”

#211

Post by cyberax »

bluecheese452 wrote: post #210
cyberax wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia lost nearly 2 decades of development post-WWI. And had a widespread hunger in 1930-s with 4-8 million people dead (we _still_ don't know the accurate number). Even just looking at the industrial growth rates, the socialistic economy of the USSR was inferior to many capitalistic economies starting from the same base. E.g. South Korea or Japan. Your data about life expectancy is also plainly wrong: https://data.…

You are willfully missing the point. You can’t compare Russia to South Korea to claim communism bad. Russia has and will screw up every system it tries. You need to compare communist Russia to capitalist Russia. There the comparison looks much less favorable. Also your graph proves my point. The giant drop in life expectancy is when it transitioned from communism to capitalism.

> You are willfully missing the point. You can’t compare Russia to South Korea to claim communism bad.

Why? I absolutely can. DPRK vs South Korea is an even better example.

> Also your graph proves my point. The giant drop in life expectancy is when it transitioned from communism to capitalism.

Well, duh. And capitalism _swiftly_ outpaced the previous rate. As somebody who experienced Soviet dentistry and medicine first-hand, I'm not at all surprised.

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

#212

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Kudos for the compilers reference, this is something that many to this day aren't aware, thinking that BASIC started as interpreted and compilers came later, when it was actually an engineering decision to make it fit into microcomputers.

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

#213

Post by pjmlp »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #119
vee-kay wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

Yes, sadly even VB is at the end of the road, as the .NET team nowadays only focus on C#.

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

#214

Post by areweai »

derangedHorse wrote: post #190
areweai wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of Microsoft, I'm not seeing it. Being born into a 1% household and understanding the asymmetric upside that having the money and the time to speculate is far more significant than the civil and criminal legal violations on the way. The most common way to go from one-percenter rich to .001% rich is to already have enough wealthy people generating capital in your personal network that you can raise capital…

> followed by asking her for 80,000 dollars ASAP What real life example is this from?

https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-3/

None actually, because I didn't recall the original amount correctly and I failed to correct for inflation, and Microsoft was already doing pretty well at that point. That was inaccurate to say.

It does make you think, though. If you too are able to work hard and build an operating system or save up six figures corrected for inflation, that still doesn't get you anything. What you really need is for your mother to be a good friend and socio-economic equal of chair of IBM.

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

#215

Post by FarmerPotato »

accrual wrote: post #128
ndiddy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repeti…

Pretty interesting. I wonder if a whitelist against certain columns in the output could help, e.g. this column can only contain valid x86 instructions (e.g. MOV is allowed, M0V is not), this column can only contain hexadecimal (1 is allowed but never "l"), etc. Probably more work than it's worth given the final line-by-line comparison that happens anyway.

I tried giving a dictionary of "preferred recognitions" to the OCR but got no improvement.

I might do what you said, column sensitive. A first-pass assembler which does spell checking and makes the corrections. M0V is a single replacement on MOV, MOV8 is closest to MOVB. For registered, R Oh must be R zero. But R Oh will be valid as a symbol name (curse your poor choice of symbol name). Alas, R1 is defined in the symbol table as a mnemonic for 1.

This idiom occurs in TMS9900 assembly (of which I have 2100+ pages to scan)

Indexed addressing into caller's register file: MOV @R1*2(R13),R0

Where R1 is 1, a small offset in #words so the operand is pointer to the word after where R13 points. Yet @RI(R13) is valid if RI is in the symbol table.

So there has to be some heuristic that starts at "is RI a defined symbol?" "Can a symbol be used in this context?" Yes/Nope: it is probably R1.

And R11 is used a lot.

Same curse on people who used I as a counter variable in type-in programs. Countless folks typed it as a 1 in expressions before magazines got better fonts.

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

#217

Post by bluecheese452 »

cyberax wrote: post #211
bluecheese452 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are willfully missing the point. You can’t compare Russia to South Korea to claim communism bad. Russia has and will screw up every system it tries. You need to compare communist Russia to capitalist Russia. There the comparison looks much less favorable. Also your graph proves my point. The giant drop in life expectancy is when it transitioned from communism to capitalism.

> You are willfully missing the point. You can’t compare Russia to South Korea to claim communism bad. Why? I absolutely can. DPRK vs South Korea is an even better example. > Also your graph proves my point. The giant drop in life expectancy is when it transitioned from communism to capitalism. Well, duh. And capitalism _swiftly_ outpaced the previous rate. As somebody who experienced Soviet dentistry and medicine fi…

Sure then I can compare China to Somalia to claim capitalism bad.

DPRK is a chinese buffer state run by a cult of personality where South Korea is a strategic allied US country. Like yes I too would take South Korea’s position? It has nothing to do with capitalism.

Did it? Doesn’t look too swift to me. Also why not compare Chinese life expectancy now to before communism? Looks pretty good.

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

#218

Post by r14c »

Scroll_Swe wrote: post #201
r14c wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We didn't try communism as far as I know. We hunted it down and murdered it in its cradle if I'm reading the CIA declassified archives correctly.

Why is every HN thread glazing communism now? Are people that broken nowadays? boo hoo I dont have the new iphone the moment it release. Bish I was on PS1 until 2004. Ask East Germans, Poland, Lithuania, Lativa, Estonia etc if communism or capitalism is better. I'll wait. :)

Glazing? I stated an historical fact. What doesn't math for me is why we care so much what kind of economy other people decide to have. Eastern Europe isn't soviet anymore obviously. They can make their own choices.
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