12 Oct
2006
12 Oct
'06
10:23 a.m.
On 10/12/2006 at 4:14 PM Jules Richardson wrote:
That's interesting - given the evolution of both
DOS and the IT industry,
I'm surprised that at least parts weren't written in some other language
(e.g.
C) by the time version 6 came out.
I've probed around in the archive and it looks to be the real thing, based
on some old MS-DOS 2.00 code samples I obtained from Microsoft
directly--you can still see references to things link IBMBIO.COM.
Miserable coding style, by the way--it's amazing that the product could
support its own weight for as long as it did.
Newer utilities are written in C, for what it's worth--which is about what
I'd expect.
An interesting bit of the archie is that it includes the source for
qbasic--something I didn't expect. And the source and documentation (such
as it is) for COW--Microsoft's Character Windows.
From a historical standpoint, it's pretty cool.
Cheers,
Chuck