My first PC as a kid ran MS-DOS 4, so seeing today’s news on Open Sourcing DOS 4 takes me back.

Today, in partnership with IBM and in the spirit of open innovation, we’re releasing the source code to MS-DOS 4.00 under the MIT license. There’s a somewhat complex and fascinating history behind the 4.0 versions of DOS, as Microsoft partnered with IBM for portions of the code but also created a branch of DOS called Multitasking DOS that did not see a wide release.

I played with LOGO and Applesoft BASIC on my grade school’s Apple IIe, but GW-BASIC shipped with MS-DOS 4 and was the first programming language that I knew inside and out.

I struggled at times because book and magazine examples were written for BASICA, which mostly worked, but it sometimes took some extra fiddling.

MS-DOS 5.0 exposed me to QBasic, which was the first programming language I worked with that had an IDE.

I fondly remember writing code on that old 386 and playing DOS games. I remember thinking there would eventually be no limits between the code and what I saw was possible on Star Trek: The Next Generation just a few years later.

Looking back, we aren’t there yet, but we are closer to the Star Trek computer and Holodeck than to the technology I grew up in.