It was 1989, and I was obsessed with the Mac. Apple's portable, 9-inch-screen computer was an exciting graphical leap, and I wanted to use it for everything. But I wasn't using it. Instead, I, like ...

How was DOS part of the PC revolution? Is DOS still around? What did Bill write a long time ago? Remember the DOS prompt? DOS stands for disk operating system. The latest announcement is a blast from ...

I am sure this question has been asked before but I have searched this Forum and Microsoft Knowledge Base and did not find the answer. Here is the question again.<P>How do you go about finding the ...

TL;DR: Microsoft will likely never release the original source code of Windows into the wild, but the company is clearly interested in sharing important episodes of its software development history.

Reader Steve P. sends in this question: “I’m running Windows 2000 and want to upgrade my system BIOS. The instructions say to create a bootable disk with the format a:/s command. However, the /s doesn ...

A decade after releasing the source code for MS-DOS 1.1 and MS-DOS 2.0, Microsoft has open sourced a (slightly) more recent operating system: MS-DOS 4.0. First released in 1988, you can now download ...

Microsoft co-founders Paul Allen, left, and Bill Gates with an array of personal computers in the early 1980s. Microsoft’s decision to make software, rather than produce a PC of its own, defined its ...

Reader Rob W. asks: “Is there any way to create a boot disk that allows access to NTFS drives?” Sysinternals offers NTFSDOS, a utility that allows access to NTFS volumes from MS-DOS. A freeware ...

Facepalm: Microsoft deserves kudos for open-sourcing the MS-DOS 4.00 source code, shedding light on an important milestone in computing history. But the tech giant has bungled the release in a way ...

<I>/EDIT: Sorry all for three new topics, I posted in less than 30 mins, but I am on dial-up, and I usually write posts and mails, when not connected, and then when I on-line (for an hour or so), I ...