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Fun historical tidbit: Tim Paterson, the author of 86-DOS (which went on to become Microsoft's famous MS-DOS), did his early 8086 development on a CP/M machine

Fun historical tidbit: Tim Paterson, the author of 86-DOS (which went on to become Microsoft's famous MS-DOS), did his early 8086 development on a CP/M machine. He wrote an 8086 cross-assembler and also an 8080-to-8086 translator. Eventually, once 86-DOS was up and running, he used the translator to translate his assembler and translator to 8086/DOS code and his OS became self-hosting. The resulting ASM.ASM [1] and TRANS.ASM [2] sources are now finally available thanks to Microsoft's release of the early MS-DOS source code. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v1.25/source/ASM.ASM https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v1.25/source... [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v1.25/source/TRANS.ASM https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v1.25/source...

andrewf 5y ago
This BYTE (June 1982) article compares the register/instruction substitutions of a few translators, including the MS-DOS one (acquired from SCP) and XLT86 (mentioned in the README as the source of 8088ify's translation): https://tech-insider.org/personal-computers/research/acrobat/8206-b.pdf https://tech-insider.org/personal-computers/research/acrobat... I'd not read that Tim Paterson story before. I have read the reverse: he built the filesystem for the Japanese 8-bit MSX computers under a Z80 emulator on MS-DOS, using IBM's BIOS for actual disk I/O. https://www.msx.org/wiki/The_History_of_MSX-DOS https://www.msx.org/wiki/The_History_of_MSX-DOS
- musicale 5y ago
  The BYTE article is pure gold - is there any modern publication which combines these sorts of bizarrely entertaining metaphors with the technical details of microprocessor architecture? > Los Angeles is the 8080, San Francisco is the Z80, Sydney is the 8086, Catholicism is CP/M-86, and Protestantism is MS-DOS. is officially my new favorite out-of-context quote about early microprocessors and operating systems.
  - desiarnezjr 5y ago
    No, BYTE, Dr. Dobbs and the like are relics of a bygone era. Anything that worked was exciting and worth documenting, extrapolating and speculating on. :) Now it's all click driven from what I can tell. :(

andrewf 5y ago

This BYTE (June 1982) article compares the register/instruction substitutions of a few translators, including the MS-DOS one (acquired from SCP) and XLT86 (mentioned in the README as the source of 8088ify's translation): https://tech-insider.org/personal-computers/research/acrobat/8206-b.pdf https://tech-insider.org/personal-computers/research/acrobat... I'd not read that Tim Paterson story before. I have read the reverse: he built the filesystem for the Japanese 8-bit MSX computers under a Z80 emulator on MS-DOS, using IBM's BIOS for actual disk I/O. https://www.msx.org/wiki/The_History_of_MSX-DOS https://www.msx.org/wiki/The_History_of_MSX-DOS

musicale 5y ago
The BYTE article is pure gold - is there any modern publication which combines these sorts of bizarrely entertaining metaphors with the technical details of microprocessor architecture? > Los Angeles is the 8080, San Francisco is the Z80, Sydney is the 8086, Catholicism is CP/M-86, and Protestantism is MS-DOS. is officially my new favorite out-of-context quote about early microprocessors and operating systems.
- desiarnezjr 5y ago
  No, BYTE, Dr. Dobbs and the like are relics of a bygone era. Anything that worked was exciting and worth documenting, extrapolating and speculating on. :) Now it's all click driven from what I can tell. :(