{"id":1568052,"date":"2026-05-01T16:08:05","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T16:08:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/JRGwQKjmQJxVVz9EimAVL6"},"modified":"2026-05-01T16:08:05","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T16:08:05","slug":"this-historic-os-was-not-stored-digitally-so-a-fleet-of-historians-have-transcribed-the-source-code-from-ancient-print-outs-in-order-to-make-it-open-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/this-historic-os-was-not-stored-digitally-so-a-fleet-of-historians-have-transcribed-the-source-code-from-ancient-print-outs-in-order-to-make-it-open-source\/","title":{"rendered":"This historic OS was not stored digitally, so a fleet of historians have transcribed the source code from ancient print-outs in order to make it open source"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I’m dating myself here, but the operating systems I remember most clearly banging my head against in my youth were Windows 95 and Windows XP. Obviously, plenty of computer interface history predates the panel-style design we’re so familiar with now, and Microsoft has announced fresh efforts to preserve this.<\/p>\n

Microsoft has shared the source code for 86-DOS 1.00, a precursor to MS-DOS, via GitHub<\/a>. Uploaded on the vintage operating system’s 45th birthday, a recent blog post<\/a> explains that this preservation effort was a more serious undertaking than simply unearthing a bunch of ancient floppy disks and lifting the data. It turns out that the source code for this early version of 86-DOS was not stored digitally.<\/p>\n

Instead Tim Paterson, the original author of DOS, had held onto print-outs of code for a variety of things, including source listings for assemblers and “some well-known utilities such as CHKDSK”. In order to present this code as downloadable files on GitHub, someone had to transcribe or scan this material, and then reconstruct the code from the printouts.<\/p>\n

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