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👶💾 Ah yes, the thrilling tale of 86-DOS: a young programmer's quest to create a "small" operating system that would eventually become the bug-riddled backbone of the PC world. 🎉🤦‍♂️ Brace yourselves for an epic journey from #QDOS to MS-DOS, where the real innovation was selling it to Microsoft.
https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/birth-of-86-dos #86DOS #MSDOS #OperatingSystems #TechHistory #ProgrammingJourney #HackerNews #ngated
Birth of 86-DOS

Events and ideas that led to development of the MS-DOS predecessor

Programming at the right level
Aug 28, 2025 at 3:39pmHacker News n-gate
Show threadARGVMI~1.PIFAug 28, 2025

@ngate

“Bug-riddled” isn't really fair. As far as 1981 #microcomputer operating systems go, #MSDOS itself was quite solid and did its job well.

Problem is that its job didn't involve preventing buggy applications from scribbling on whatever memory they cared to scribble on, and most of them were written in assembly and/or C, which had very few safety features. System crashes were therefore common and sometimes catastrophic.

But, again, 1981. This was typical back then.

#retrocomputing