5 ms·
How much of DOS did you learn by reading MS's raw source code vs reversing the OS yourself?
by Dracophoenix 4y ago
How much of DOS did you learn by reading MS's raw source code vs reversing the OS yourself?
- ksaj 4y agoI glanced through it. I didn't learn anything new, except the definition of bloat. The raw source wasn't available when I was doing this, so I learned it entirely by reverse engineering, and documentation. Ironically I learned how the boot sector worked and basic ASM purely by using DEBUG.EXE. My computer got infected by Stoned virus, and I was pretty excited about it! This was back when DOS came with a green binder with actual documentation. It was a year or so of that before I discovered TASM and then MASM assemblers, which of course are a LOT more human-friendly. The earlier versions of DOS were entirely written in ASM, and they were super-tight. But later versions were all rewritten in high level languages. The stuff in the leak is all the bloated high-level language versions.