Computer archeology...

(Doing this quickly, forgive me for lack of links...)

Long ago, there was a company called Wendin, that made some DOS shells with VMS and UNIX flavors (called PCVMS and PCNX) (and, if you really look deeply, there was the XTC editor, too).

They also, later, made an Operating System Toolbox (roughly VMS flavored, as I remember) which was intended as the basis of a "roll-your-own" IBM PC operating system.

They then built a DOS clone with the OST, but with multiuser / multitasking support. This was called Wendin DOS.

To help launch this, they had a debugging contest. Buy the "beta" version for a fairly nominal fee, and whoever finds the most bugs wins $500.00.

I won. Since I did assembly language for my anti-virus work and had written my own 8086 machine code interpreter, I went through the DOS functions and COMMAND functions systematically with example programs and found lots of things that didn't work.

Later, there was internal strife in Wendin (father owned the company, sons worked for him). The developers left.

Since I was so good at debugging Wendin DOS, I got hired to keep working on it.

I think I did an OK job, but some of the stuff was beyond me (at that time).

What does this have to do with computer archeology?

Well, as I mentioned before, I'm archiving my floppies.

And I found the source code to Wendin DOS.

It's an older version. Since I didn't write the disk label, I think this is the source code provided to me when I started the job.

Maybe I'll find my development directory in my piles of bits. Maybe not.

But at least this part of computer history (and, yes, it's a minor part) has not been lost.