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 onenostalgic 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