Earlier quoted context omitted.
Punch cards are still a form of digital storage, mind.
Also a form of storing things on paper
Reminds me of an old fortune cookie message or meme, something like "digital data is made from analog parts".
Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
131–140 of 218 posts
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#132At 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..…
The term "programmer-archaeologist" was coined by the author Vernor Vinge in his 1999 "A Deepness in the Sky"[0] (a pretty great read and definitely recommended) and the field is arguably a real thing now[1].
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 activit…
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 on sweetheart terms to buy the labor of people who don't.
Then you sell it at a massive premium and repeat.
I think it's empirically dubious to identify the UW mainframes as the secret sauce instead of "being able to ask your mom for a meeting with the chairman of IBM followed by asking her for 80,000 dollars ASAP."
If the original creators of DOS were born into a wealthy family and on a first name basis with the chairman of IBM, do you think they would've sold it to Gates?
Trying to attribute the tech business "founding crime" feels like displacement for what is perfectly legal and accepted cultural practice.
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#134Related ongoing thread: Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48257058
[dead]
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#135Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#136Looking through the source is a great reminder of how constrained early computing was. It's amazing how much of this architecture still influences modern systems.
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#137I 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.
To be fair, i think you needed a cutthroat businessman leading the company. Which i guess is more or less the same today
> a cutthroat businessman leading the company
I'm sure his family connections aided him significantly.
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 activit…
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…
We need a better system. We tried communism and that was shit, so this is the least bad system we have.
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think you are mistaking the registry for the registry. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030808-00/?p=42...
You know, that's possible, I wouldn't be surprised. This was 20 years ago. I only recall a sense that the w2k system seemed more complicated than XP in that area.
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#140It 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/…
I remember when I realized I had been using Microsoft all along through my Commodore 64.
The Commodore 64 got me started in computers, back when I was in grade school. Countless late nights programming in BASIC. All this time I never knew BASIC was licensed from Microsoft. Thanks!
"Commodore licensed BASIC from Microsoft in 1977 on a 'pay once, no royalties' basis after Jack Tramiel turned down Bill Gates' offer of a $3 per unit fee, stating, 'I'm already married,' and would pay no more than $25,000 for a perpetual license."