back to article Apple releases previously SECRET OPERATING SYSTEM SOURCE CODE

The Computer History Museum has scored something of a coup, publishing – with Cupertino's permission – the source code for the Apple II's DOS, version 3.1. The archeological code, posted here, is the whole 4,000-plus – that's thousands of lines of code, not millions in a misprint – complete with comments like “if it ain't 3 …

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  1. William Boyle

    OK

    So, where did I put my QEMU 6502 emulator? :-)

    1. ecofeco Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: OK

      Next to the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator?

      That's mine with the carrots. ---------------->>

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How times have changed. 4,000 lines was a lot in the late 70's. Now, if you go to school to be a programmer, 4,000 lines is something you do as a project for a grade. How times have changed.

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Or even just a single page of a website.

    2. MD Rackham

      Yes, but we didn't have cut/paste back then.

      1. Deryk Barker

        Oh dear, really?

        I can clearly recall using it back in the mid-70s and if you check out Ritchie and Thompson's June 1970 memo describing the QED editor, you'll find it there too...

        1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          I can clearly recall using [copy and paste] back in the mid-70s and if you check out Ritchie and Thompson's June 1970 memo describing the QED editor, you'll find it there too...

          Agreed (though I suspect the post you're responding to was meant as a joke). The IBM mainframe editors had copy&paste since at least the mid-70s, with SPF (the precursor to ISPF), and I suspect the pre-SPF TSO editor had it as well, which would push it back to '71. I don't know whether early editors for, say, CMS or MTS supported copy/paste; it'd be interesting to hear from folks who used them. (I used VM/CMS in the late '80s, but never the early CP-branded versions.)

  3. ecofeco Silver badge

    Writtten for 13,000

    That's about 46,000 in today's money.

    http://www.halfhill.com/inflation.html

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  4. XioNYC
    Stop

    Ho, hum

    Not ProDOS, not GS/OS, not System 7, nor A/UX... heaven forbid that NewtonOS 2.1's intimates should become public for viewing! No, gentlemen (and Ladies, too): this jewel that adorns this latest crown* in the Computer Museum collection is purely unadulterated cubic zirconium.

    Let sleeping 6502s lie.

    (* The crown is a conical volume, gilded with quasi-open Darwin, studded with 1.8-carat WebKit, and was last seen half-buried under PPC code that litters Dogcow's litterbox...)

  5. btrower

    I am all over that.

    The first time I got paid for writing software was for that machine. Hard to believe, but it was fancy back then. I loved it.

    I have to find that code and take a peek ... or maybe a poke.

  6. Alan Denman

    Microsoft knew where to shove it...

    well, shove a pretty picture onto the screen so you could click away to your hearts content.

    whoo would have thought one clicky picture laid top/around a few thousand lines of code was to be worth 100's billions of dollars?

  7. Robert Grant

    Steve Wozniak?

    Isn't he the guy that helped Steve Jobs build the first Apple computer?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Steve Wozniak?

      Didn't you mean Wozn't he?

  8. David Kelly 2

    "Beneath Apple DOS"

    "Beneath Apple DOS" was the definitive work on how to communicate with Apple DOS 3.3. iIRC it included complete disassembly with comments. Through the Apple //e one could buy a printed copy of the original source code for the monitor ROM (what people call BIOS these days). Was $10 for the //e. Was essential for understanding why characters were dropped at 1200 baud when the //e 80 column screen scrolled (bug in firmware disabled IRQ at the wrong time). Once I understood the problem I found it pretty easy to write work-alike routine which did not disable IRQ yet used the same working variables as the firmware so if something I had no control over wrote to the screen it wrote in the right place and my next write followed.

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