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Microsoft Releases MSDOS 2 and WFW 1 Sources

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the 640k-ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody dept.

Lagg and Uncle_Al both wrote in about this surprising source release.

Lagg writes:

Today a technet article was posted by a Microsoft employee announcing that they are releasing to the Computer History Museum and the public at large the source code to v1.1 and 2.0 of MS-DOS as well as v1.1a of Word. All obvious jokes aside this could be good for projects such as DOSBox. Note also that said employee considers 300kb to be small for source code. Seems rather large to me, even now. But in any case this will be an interesting thing to dig into. To save the trouble of link chasing here are the relevant links:

Computer history article for MS-DOS (direct link to source)

Computer history article for Word (direct link to source)

 
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  • (Score: 2) by tniemi on Wednesday March 26 2014, @10:21AM

    by tniemi (1639) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @10:21AM (#21509)

    The early Word versions were a laughing stock of the word processing world.

    For those that want to refresh their memories I recommend the "Almost Perfect" by W. E. Peterson (ex- Wordperfect's executive vice president).

    You can buy the Kindle version for a few bucks:
    http://www.amazon.com/Almost-Perfect-W-E-Pete-Pete rson-ebook/dp/B003XKNWUE [amazon.com]

    Or read the freely available one at:
    http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ [wordplace.com]

    The story is both hilarious and tragic.

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  • (Score: 2) by wjwlsn on Wednesday March 26 2014, @01:45PM

    by wjwlsn (171) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @01:45PM (#21617) Homepage Journal

    I never used any DOS versions of Word, but I knew Word Perfect fairly well. I hated it, both as a user and as someone that supported users (university computer lab assistant). The *only* thing I liked about Word Perfect was that it gave me an excuse to meet girls in the computer lab... "Oh, having trouble with those formatting codes? I can help, but my shift's almost over and the next guy is an idiot. How about we meet here after lunch? Or... tell you what, come to lunch with me..."

    Oh. Yeah, it's 2014 and I'm married now. Anyway, I loved Word Perfect.

    --
    I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.

  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday March 26 2014, @10:52PM

    by Reziac (2489) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @10:52PM (#21884) Homepage

    I collect WordPerfect stuff, and have a hardcopy of the book. The tale kinda makes a WP user want to whup WPCorp's management upside their collective head. :(

    WordDOS was decent enough as of v5.5, and quite nice as of v6. It wasn't in WPDOS's league (nothing was), but WordDOS was sure as hell less irritating than WordScar and MultiMate.

    WPWin has been both very good, and very frustrating because of when it's NOT good. WinWord has been more consistent, but to a WP user, it's always frustrating. :/