Microsoft arguably built its business on MS-DOS, and on Tuesday the software giant and the Mountain View, CA-based Computer History Museum took the unprecedented step of publishing the source code for ...

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 ...

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 ...

On this day in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded a company called Micro-Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The two men had worked together before, as members of the Lakeside Programming group in ...

Reader Steve P. sends in this question: “I’m running Windows 2000 and want to upgrade my system BIOS. The instructions say to create a bootable disk with the format a:/s command. However, the /s doesn ...

Recently, we have been covering quite a lot of retro stuff for Windows which shows how modern apps have their roots in the '90s. If you are a fan of the bygone era of Windows, you are likely to be ...

Microsoft has open-sourced another bit of computing history this week: The company teamed up with IBM to release the source code of 1988’s MS-DOS 4.00, a version better known for its unpopularity, ...

Editor's take: Back in the DOS days, real PC users wrote their textual tomes in the official MS-DOS Editor – I certainly did. These days, developers offer a confusing array of text editors, so ...

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 ...

It's no joke. Microsoft and IBM have joined forces to open-source the 1988 operating system MS-DOS 4.0 under the MIT License. Why? Well, why not? That got Hanselman and Wilcox digging into the ...