Microsoft made a very interesting contribution this week to the Computer History Museum. The company made available the source code for two of the most popular software of the 1980s: MS-DOS (1.1 and 2.0) and Word For Windows 1.1a.
In one nostalgic text on Microsoft blog, the giant recalls the story from the beginning, when IBM approached Microsoft to work on a project called "Chess". Since then this partnership has earned most of the evolution of personal computers, with the launch of an Operating System (MS-DOS) and then the most used text processor at that time (Word For Windows).
It's funny to make a comparison with now, but at the beginning of the MS-DOS project, Microsoft had 100 employees and the system's source code had only 300KB. There's no way to compare with the size of a current operating system.
You can download the source code from MS-DOS and Word For Windows at the Internet History Museum at the following address: www.computerhistory. org/atchm