Posted on 03/25/2014 1:03:03 PM PDT by Dalberg-Acton
With the permission of Microsoft Corporation, the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available the source and object code to Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system versions 1.1 and 2.0, for non-commercial use.
The zip file contains four subdirectories:
Back in the day they did some amazing things with a limited amount of space
Exactly.
When you’ve only got 4K of memory to play with, you become incredibly creative.
Now, with bazillions of bytes to play with, programming becomes quite sloppy and wasteful.
It’s frustrating that the faster computers get, the slower they seem to work.
Drat! Not a 5.25 floppy drive in the house.
May I suggest QEMU o maybe VMWare Player?
Yay, get to play Leisure Suit Larry.
If you orphan a program then the program should go to the public domain.
Format c:/
Most people couldn’t afford a hard drive in those days (1983).
I remember when I was finally able to get an IBM clone with a 10 Meg drive that was full height MFM encoded. Chris Fisher, workplace genius, told me to use “debug” to execute the command line program on the controller at memory address C800 or *something* like that. I was able to change the interleave and went from like 10 revolutions to read a sector to only 4. Made a huge diff in the performance.
I thought that 10 Meg. was more space than I would ever need.
When all one needs is number-crunching and a straightforward alpha display, any MS OS product beyone DOS 6.22 is a complete waste of both your and the CPU's time.
Flame away, PPFI crowd.
Exactly. What is this "format c:" thing? Who has THREE floppy drives?
Snarky, perhaps, but it’s world-class snark!
Two was an extravagance!
Tell your grand kids, “When I was your age we only had one floppy drive. And we LIKED it!”
Does that make me a dinosaur???
LOL! Yeah, “We had to use a paper punch to get 720 KB out of our floppy disks and IT WAS GOOD ENOUGH FOR US!”
I sure am thankful for my DOS experience. It taught me so much about organizing my computer and files.
(And, yes, I know my previous post should have contained a back slash rather than forward slash, but I hit the wrong key thanks to my old eyes. :-))
I worked for a company in 1976 that had a 8080 with the LEDs and toggle switches on the front panel. I can’t remember if it was a MITS or an IMSIA, but I marveled at the old teletype machine they had hooked to it to input a program so they didn’t have to use the front panel switches.
Other companies were producing more advanced stuff years ahead of this, but the costs put them out of reach of small companies or hobbyists. My first computer was a Heathkit with a hexadecimal keypad and 7 segment LED readout. Next was a Tandy Color Computer, then a Tandy 1000 IBM compatible.
Ain't that the truth?
Now, with bazillions of bytes to play with, programming becomes quite sloppy and wasteful.
One of the things that hurts is the attitude of acceptance for "quick and dirty".
Granted there are good things that you can do with more memory (i.e. full debug symbols, more expressive data-structures, etc).
IMO, we're quickly approaching a point where an formally proved and verified OS (and compiler) are needs, not wants… but that's directly antithetical to the mindset put forward in large portions of "the industry" (i.e. web-site programming).
It's interesting, that.
Sort of like how the greatest poetry was written when the expectations of rhyme and rhythm were taken seriously. Once those were gone, it all dissolved into strings of meaninglessness.
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