The oldest known version of MS-DOS, 86-DOS, demonstrated by retrocomputing archaeologist #MSDOS #VintageComputing @TomsHardware
An ancient MS-DOS ancestor has been taken for a test drive by YouTuber and retrocomputing archaeologist Thomas Cherryhomes. 86-DOS version 0.1 C was unearthed and added to the Internet Archive recently. Cherryhomes demonstrates it being installed, booted, and used to translate and compile an application written for CP/M.
It is the earliest copy of 86-DOS known to exist. 86-DOS was chosen by Microsoft as the basis of what would become PC-DOS and MS-DOS. Thus, the discovery was of “very profound importance in Computing history,” asserted the computer archaeologist in his YouTube video.
Getting 86-DOS up and running isn’t as straightforward as firing up a PC emulator and booting the disk image. Yes, this OS was written for Intel 8086 processors, but the target systems didn’t use an IBM PC architecture. Cherryhomes goes into some detail about the Gazelle computer by Seattle Computer Products, and highlights that it was used by Microsoft for the final linking process for building MS-DOS up until version 5.0.
See the video below and more on Tom’s Hardware here.
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