This is the precursor to MS-DOS and is likely the oldest known version to survive. (I had previously uploaded Version 0.34, which was at the time thought to hold that honor.)
↫ Archive.org
The longer we wait, the harder it’s going to be to archive and preserve software like this.
At least software of that era could run untethered.on one’s local hardware and didn’t require remote activation. It’s pretty clear that “cloud software” may be the most fragile of all, disappearing forever. But even software and hardware that runs locally is following a dark path in terms of archives. Microsoft/apple/google/etc keep getting stricter with forced hardware & software activation. Applying “factory defaults” may very well brick devices in the future when the hardware/software is declared obsolete.
https://techcult.com/fix-unable-to-activate-iphone/
The thing is…100% of devices will eventually loose their activation servers. Meanwhile electronics have become much less user serviceable in the past decade. Soldered storage is extremely regressive.
The best solution for long term archiving, given what the software industry has turned into, may be archiving the “warez” sites with pirated versions of software. It’s too bad copyright law hasn’t provided us with a better solution. By the time copyright expires a century from now many/most of these original works along with their developers will have perished.
That’s an incredibly off-topic reply.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s not like DRM “activation” and unservicable hardware is a modern issue. DEC were doing serial number activation (License PAKs) back in the VAX days. And unless you were an IBM engineer with a truck load of schematics and documentation, you were never going to fix a System 360.
And “unservicable parts” are a massive issue for older computers as well. Fixing Commodore 64s and Amigas is getting increasingly difficult as the supply of custom chips dwindles.
It not a new problem, it’s just evolved.
The123king,
They had some hardware keys and the like, but these were rare enough that most consumers would have never seen one. And at least in principal they would still work. In all my life I have never seen DOS/early windows software that could be remotely killed I’m open to the possibility that I’m mistaken, but do you have any examples?
As I understand it, some IBM mainframes could have functionality like more ram/cpus activated over the phone. But even this, to my knowledge, couldn’t be retroactively terminated.
I have no idea about this. I don’t deny mainframes may have innovated a lot of DRM tech & proprietary hardware, but I was really referring to mainstream PCs affecting normal consumers.
Part availability may be a challenge, but in terms of serviceability I’ve seen some of these repairs on youtube and even the re-soldering jobs are accessible. My criticism for vendors today is irrepairability being an engineering goal to ensure that hardware cannot be economically repaired by end users. Like having SDDs with known finite lifetimes being soldered and components that are DRM locked such that neither end users nor qualified repair shops can repair them without vendor permission. Apple’s leading the way with these trends, these are extremely hostile anti-consumer trends and they bode poorly for the future.
Actually authentication dongles via the serial port or similar were rapidly coming into use even back then…. Merriam webster claims dongle in this context was first used in 1981.
cb88,
I am aware they existed, as I said in the other post, but they weren’t terribly common for consumer apps. Or maybe I was just too late to have experienced them, but personally I never encountered them personally until the 2010s. 100% of the DOS/windows software I grew up with ran without security dongles.
My point wasn’t to say they didn’t exist at all, but that an archive could reasonably recreate a typical consumer experience that many of us had growing up without them. More commonly copy protection took the shape of diskettes that couldn’t be copied using conventional means or games that used code wheels and the like.
I found this…
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/dongle-protected-ms-dos.1210539/
It appears that early arabic versions of DOS needed a security dongle. It makes me wonder if security dongles were more common in foreign regions?
This was back before MS learned that the OS is just a platform and the real product is Office…
They were probably trying to make some profit off the translation, and enforce licensing in the arabic market I bet they were price gouging for it in trying to get some of the oil money.
Would be really interesting to have the source files to this version so it could be compared to the actual v1.1 that is available. On a side note, does anyone know what type of machines were used for the early development of MS-DOS? I am guessing some version of PDP’s.
No… probably not in fact. Seattle Computer Products that originally wrote 86-DOS made S-100 bus 8086 microcomputers, and it was probably written in assembler from a CP/M computer aka a cheap microcomputer not a mini like a PDP.
Read here: Dos 1.14 was only 4000 lines of assembler…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Paterson