In a first for Microsoft, the software giant announced Tuesday it would release the source code of two of its earliest products.
The announcement, posted on Microsoft's official blog, Technet, by Roy Levin, Managing Director Microsoft Research, said the company is working with the Computer History Museum to curate the source code of the earliest versions of Dos and Microsoft Word.
"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 post said.
The Verge said developers and museums stand to benefit from the move. It said museums have to work hard to convince companies to share their source code, with the end objective being preservation of the original code. The report also wondered if Microsoft would next be sharing the code of early Windows versions.
"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. 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," Levin further said in his post.
He narrated the story behind Microsoft and IBM's work that led to development of MS DOS. The post said many of Microsoft's staff worked overtime on the IBM's project to create an operating system. Air packages were being sent daily from between Boca Raton and Seattle. The release of DOS was soon followed by release of Word. This was soon followed by Word for Windows, which went on to become a money minter for the organization.
Ubergizmo added users wanting to download the source code will have to agree to not using the source code for commercial purpose or sharing it on the Internet.
