The code for MS-DOS at last!

Microsoft have donated the source code for MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a to the Computer History Museum. The source code can be downloaded and read. Its fairly interesting but only for historical reasons.

I had a brief look through the source code for COMMAND.COM, my 8086 assembler is a bit rusty (and was never that good to be honest) but it seemed fairly straightforward. Of course these early versions of MS-DOS were far more basic and limited than modern operating systems like Mac OSX but then again the file sizes were somewhat smaller...

I still remember buying MS-DOS 4.01 on diskette to upgrade the Amstrad PC we had at the time, which came with version 3.2. I used to be quite nifty at writing batch files though can barely remember any of the language nowadays! @echo off or something...