My builds are still using the original toolchain included kindly in that package. I'd like to compile it for my XP boxes and why not for 98 & NT 4.0 for the sake of it. That seems to have settled now, although I still think Microsoft themselves could've hosted the sources, that's some nice work there! I'd like to second request to publish the instructions for building the product so that others could try it out without having to reinvent the wheel.
Mind you, downloading the sources from Computer History Museum was somewhat challenging, because after the initial publication of the article the CHM's download links were throwing out errors. You can only imagine how surprised I was when I learned it's not a joke nor a hoax, but the real deal! I'm glad to see that Microsoft realizes the cultural impact their products have had and continue to have and that they decided to make both of these programs available to the wider public. Psyche wrote:When I first heard of this, my first reaction was "But it's not April Fool's Day yet!".
Thanks to the Computer History Museum, these important pieces of source code will be preserved and made available to the community for historical and technical scholarship. Great things come from modest beginnings, and the great Microsoft devices and services of the future will probably start small, just as MS-DOS and Word for Windows did.
From those roots we’ve grown in a few short decades to become a company that has sold more than 200 million licenses of Windows 8 and has over 1 billion people using Microsoft Office. It’s mind-boggling to think of the growth from those days when Microsoft had under 100 employees and a Microsoft product (MS-DOS) had less than 300KB (yes, kilobytes) of source code. Word for Windows was a remarkable engineering and marketing achievement, and we are happy to provide its source code to the museum. However, it was the 1989 release of Word for Windows that became a blockbuster for the company and within four years it was generating over half the revenue of the worldwide word-processing market. An electronic message system was established and there was almost always someone flying the arduous 4,000 mile commute.”įollowing closely on the heels of MS DOS, Microsoft released the first DOS-based version of Microsoft Word in 1983, which was designed to be used with a mouse. Bulky packages containing computer gear and other goodies were air-expressed almost daily between the Boca Raton laboratory and Seattle.
IBM and Microsoft developed a unique relationship that paved the way for advancements in the nascent personal computer industry, and subsequent advancements in personal computing.īill Gates was interviewed by David Bunnell just after the launch of the IPM PC in the early 1980s for PC Magazine’s inaugural issue, and provided the backstory: “For more than a year, 35 of Microsoft's staff of 100 worked fulltime (and plenty of overtime) on the IBM project. Without their own on hand, Microsoft licensed an operating system from Seattle Computer Products which would become the foundation for PC-DOS and MS-DOS. However, they had other plans and asked Microsoft to create an operating system. Microsoft, at the time, provided the BASIC language interpreter for IBM. In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to work on a project code-named “Chess.” What followed was a significant milestone in the history of the personal computer.
As part of this ongoing project, the museum will make available two of the most widely used software programs of the 1980’s, MS DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, to help future generations of technologists better understand the roots of personal computing. The museum has done an excellent job of curating some of the most significant historical software programs in computing history. With the help of the Computer History Museum, we are making this code available to the public for the first time. On Tuesday, we dusted off the source code for early versions of MS-DOS and Word for Windows. The following post is from Roy Levin, distinguished engineer and managing director, Microsoft Research.
Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public