As the forerunner to the graphical user interfaces in Microsoft’s Windows platform, MS-DOS helped set the stage for the company’s dominance in the PC software market. When MS-DOS was released in 1981, ...

Unlock the full InfoQ experience by logging in! Stay updated with your favorite authors and topics, engage with content, and download exclusive resources. Vivek Yadav, an engineering manager from ...

Ernie Smith is a former contributor to EdTech and a tech history nut who researches vintage operating systems for fun. Given all the options for computing in the modern day — tablets, laptops and ...

TL;DR: Microsoft will likely never release the original source code of Windows into the wild, but the company is clearly interested in sharing important episodes of its software development history.

A decades-old quarrel over a defining event in computer history -- the creation of the program that propelled Microsoft to dominance -- has suddenly become a legal dispute that could lead to a public ...

Microsoft, like any company, has its detractors. Everyone from computer scientists to people who just hate Windows 10 have gone after it at some point. But an old, ugly rumor has just come back, with ...

Who doesn’t remember PC games such as Maniac Mansion, the King’s Quest series and the dubious adventures of Leisure Suit Larry or software such as Microsoft Works and Lotus Smart Suite? These titles ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Before Windows, there was MS-DOS—that’s the Microsoft Disk ...

In context: Back in 1980, Tim Paterson was creating a new operating system he called QDOS or Quick and Dirty Operating System. The system was later renamed 86-DOS, as it was being designed to run on ...

Building a complete operating system by compiling its source code is not something for the faint-hearted; a modern Linux or BSD distribution contains thousands of packages with millions of lines of ...

Gary Kildall started Intergalactic Digital Research (later shortened to Digital Research or just DRI) and created the first microcomputer operating system, CP/M, used on many hobbyist personal ...

Playing old PC games with an emulator on a PC seems wrong to me. While I understand playing Commodore 64 games in an emulator like VICE, booting an operating system and then running DOSBox on a ...