Microsoft releases early versions of MS-DOS and Word for Windows to public

Microsoft has now released source code for its early versions of MS-DOS - 1.1 and 2 - to the Computer History Museum (CHM). It has also donated the first version of Word for Windows.   In its official blog , Microsoft’s Roy Levin writes, “The museum has done an excellent job of curating some of the most significant historical software programs in computing history. 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 blog adds that “In 1980 when Microsoft provided only the BASIC language interpreter for IBM, it was approached by the latter to work on a project codenamed ‘Chess’. However, IBM asked Microsoft to create an operating system instead. “Microsoft licensed an operating system from Seattle Computer Products which would become the foundation for PC-DOS and MS-DOS,”   Soon after MS DOS, Microsoft released its first DOS-based version of Microsoft Word in 1983 that was designed to be used with a mouse. But it was the 1989 release of Word for Windows that really worked, which managed to generate more than half the revenue of the worldwide word-processing market.   The blog also talks about PC Magazine’s inaugural issue that provides the backstory stating, “For more than a year, 35 of Microsoft’s staff of 100 worked fulltime (and plenty of overtime) on the IBM project. Bulky packages containing computer gear and other goodies were air-expressed almost daily between the Boca Raton [IBM] laboratory and Seattle [Microsoft]. An electronic message system was established and there was almost always someone flying the arduous 4,000 mile commute.”   Those days Microsoft had mere 100 employees and a Microsoft product (MS-DOS) had less than 300KB of source code. Today, the company has sold more than 200 million licenses of Windows 8 and has over 1 billion people using Microsoft Office.   Users can download the code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows   from Computer History Museum Historical source code series.