Microsoft releases one of the most popular versions of MS-DOS as open source today. stikves shares a post:Ten years ago, Microsoft released the source for MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 to the Computer History Museum, and then later republished them for reference purposes. This code holds an important place in history and is a fascinating read of an operating system that was written entirely in 8086 assembly code nearly 45 years ago.

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.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a deal for IBM to acquire HashiCorp could materialize in the next few days. Shares of HashiCorp jumped almost 20% on the news.

UPDATE 4/24/24: IBM has confirmed the deal valued at $6.4 billion. "IBM will pay $35 per share for HashiCorp, a 42.6% premium to Monday's closing price," reports Reuters. "The acquisition will be funded by cash on hand and will add to adjusted core profit within the first full year of closing, expected by the end of 2024." HashiCorp's shares continued to surge Tuesday on the news. CNBC reports: Developers use HashiCorp's software to set up and manage infrastructure in public clouds that companies such as Amazon and Microsoft operate. Organizations also pay HashiCorp for managing security credentials. Founded in 2012, HashiCorp went public on Nasdaq in 2021. The company generated a net loss of nearly $191 million on $583 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, according to its annual report. In December, Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, whose family name is reflected in the company name, announced that he was leaving.

Revenue jumped almost 23% during that period, compared with 2% for IBM in 2023. IBM executives pointed to a difficult economic climate during a conference call with analysts in January. The hardware, software and consulting provider reports earnings on Wednesday. Cisco held $9 million in HashiCorp shares at the end of March, according to a regulatory filing. Cisco held early acquisition talks with HashiCorp, according to a 2019 report.

Edward Zitron, citing emails released as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, writes about Prabhakar Raghavan: And Raghavan -- a manager, hired by Sundar Pichai, a former McKinsey man and a manager by trade -- is an example of everything wrong with the tech industry. Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful to the world at large. Since Prabhakar took the reins in 2020, Google Search has dramatically declined, with the numerous "core" search updates allegedly made to improve the quality of results having an adverse effect, increasing the prevalence of spammy, search engine optimized content.

It's because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it. Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December 2019 (the same year as the Code Yellow fiasco), and while they remain as controlling shareholders, they clearly don't give a shit about what "Google" means anymore. Prabhakar Raghavan is a manager, and his career, from what I can tell, is mostly made up of "did some stuff at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of note, and fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet has run a story about how bad it is." This is the result of taking technology out of the hands of real builders and handing it to managers at a time when "management" is synonymous with "staying as far away from actual work as possible." And when you're a do-nothing looking to profit as much as possible, you only care about growth. You're not a user, you're a parasite, and it's these parasites that have dominated and are draining the tech industry of its value.

Raghavan's story is unique, insofar as the damage he's managed to inflict (or, if we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid in the case of Yahoo) on two industry-defining companies, and the fact that he did it without being a CEO or founder. Perhaps more remarkable, he's achieved this while maintaining a certain degree of anonymity. Everyone knows who Musk and Zuckerberg are, but Raghavan's known only in his corner of the Internet. Or at least he was. Now Raghavan has told those working on search that their "new operating reality" is one with less resources and less time to deliver things. Rot Master Raghavan is here to squeeze as much as he can from the corpse of a product he beat to death with his bare hands. Raghavan is a hall-of-fame rot economist, and one of the many managerial types that have caused immeasurable damage to the Internet in the name of growth and "shareholder value." And I believe these uber-managers - these ultra-pencil-pushers and growth-hounds - are the forces destroying tech's ability to innovate.

Longtime Slashdot reader sfraggle writes: Biplane shoot-'em up, Sopwith, is celebrating 40 years today since its first release back in 1984. The game is one of the oldest PC games still in active development today, originating as an MS-DOS game for the original IBM PC. The 40th anniversary site has a detailed history of how the game was written as a tech demo for the now-defunct Imaginet networking system. There is also a video interview with its original authors. "The game involves piloting a Sopwith biplane, attempting to bomb enemy buildings while avoiding fire from enemy planes and various other obstacles," reads the Wiki page. "Sopwith uses four-color CGA graphics and music and sound effects use the PC speaker. A sequel with the same name, but often referred to as Sopwith 2, was released in 1985."

You can play Sopwith in your browser here.

50 years ago this week, PC software pioneer Gary Kildall "demonstrated CP/M, the first commercially successful personal computer operating system in Pacific Grove, California," according to a blog post from Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum. It tells the story of "how his company, Digital Research Inc., established CP/M as an industry standard and its subsequent loss to a version from Microsoft that copied the look and feel of the DRI software."

Kildall was a CS instructor and later associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California... He became fascinated with Intel Corporation's first microprocessor chip and simulated its operation on the school's IBM mainframe computer. This work earned him a consulting relationship with the company to develop PL/M, a high-level programming language that played a significant role in establishing Intel as the dominant supplier of chips for personal computers.

To design software tools for Intel's second-generation processor, he needed to connect to a new 8" floppy disk-drive storage unit from Memorex. He wrote code for the necessary interface software that he called CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) in a few weeks, but his efforts to build the electronic hardware required to transfer the data failed. The project languished for a year. Frustrated, he called electronic engineer John Torode, a college friend then teaching at UC Berkeley, who crafted a "beautiful rat's nest of wirewraps, boards and cables" for the task.

Late one afternoon in the fall of 1974, together with John Torode, in the backyard workshop of his home at 781 Bayview Avenue, Pacific Grove, Gary "loaded my CP/M program from paper tape to the diskette and 'booted' CP/M from the diskette, and up came the prompt: *

[...] By successfully booting a computer from a floppy disk drive, they had given birth to an operating system that, together with the microprocessor and the disk drive, would provide one of the key building blocks of the personal computer revolution... As Intel expressed no interest in CP/M, Gary was free to exploit the program on his own and sold the first license in 1975.
What happened next? Here's some highlights from the blog post:

• "Reluctant to adapt the code for another controller, Gary worked with Glen Ewing to split out the hardware dependent-portions so they could be incorporated into a separate piece of code called the BIOS (Basic Input Output System)... The BIOS code allowed all Intel and compatible microprocessor-based computers from other manufacturers to run CP/M on any new hardware. This capability stimulated the rise of an independent software industry..."

• "CP/M became accepted as a standard and was offered by most early personal computer vendors, including pioneers Altair, Amstrad, Kaypro, and Osborne..."

• "[Gary's company] introduced operating systems with windowing capability and menu-driven user interfaces years before Apple and Microsoft... However, by the mid-1980s, in the struggle with the juggernaut created by the combined efforts of IBM and Microsoft, DRI had lost the basis of its operating systems business."

• "Gary sold the company to Novell Inc. of Provo, Utah, in 1991. Ultimately, Novell closed the California operation and, in 1996, disposed of the assets to Caldera, Inc., which used DRI intellectual property assets to prevail in a lawsuit against Microsoft."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Mutterings of alarm are emerging from the cloisters of Red Hat after the world's largest management consultancy was hired to help the IBM subsidiary focus engineers on their highest-value work. Red Hat confirmed the partnership with McKinsey & Company to The Reg, sharing this extract from an email from CTO Chris Wright to the Global Engineering Team:

"Hey everyone -- as I mentioned during the recent Q1 All Hands, my goal is to have Global Engineering recognized as the world's greatest open-source software engineering organization. This team is already doing amazing work, and we have several initiatives in progress to help us achieve the goal I've set. One of those is a partnership with McKinsey. The objective of this project is to help us understand and incorporate learnings on working models, development practices, and tooling from across the software industry.

"We've heard your feedback in person, during All Hands, and through RHAS [the annual Red Hat Associate Survey]. This project will help us to identify and remove mundane tasks that drain your energy so that you can focus on the most engaging and highest value work â" to make your job better. The work with McKinsey is one piece of the overall plan to help us become the world's greatest open-source software engineering organization"

Last month, the only known surviving copy of 32-bit OS/2 from Microsoft was purchased for $650. "Now, two of the internet's experts in getting early PC operating systems running today have managed to fire it up, and you can see the results," reports The Register. From the report: Why such interest in this nearly third-of-a-century old, unreleased OS? Because this is the way the PC industry very nearly went. This SDK came out in June 1990, just one month after Windows 3.0. If 32-bit OS/2 had launched as planned, Windows 3 would have been the last version before it was absorbed into OS/2 and disappeared. There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone, no fondleslabs. Twenty-first century computers would be unimaginably different. The surprise here is that we can see a glimpse of this world that never happened. The discovery of this pre-release OS shows how very nearly ready it was in 1990. IBM didn't release its solo version until April 1992, the same month as Windows 3.1 -- but now, we can see it was nearly ready two years earlier.

That's why Michal Necasek of the OS/2 Museum called his look The Future That Never Was. He uncovered a couple of significant bugs, but more impressively, he found workarounds for both, and got both features working fine. OS/2 2 could run multiple DOS VMs at once, but in the preview, they wouldn't open -- due to use of an undocumented instruction which Intel did implement in the Pentium MMX and later processors. Secondly, the bundled network client wouldn't install -- but removing a single file got that working fine. That alone is a significant difference between Microsoft's OS/2 2.0 and IBM's version: Big Blue didn't include networking until Warp Connect 3 in 1995.

His verdict: "The 6.78 build of OS/2 2.0 feels surprisingly stable and complete. The cover letter that came with the SDK stressed that Microsoft developers had been using the OS/2 pre-release for day-to-day work." Over at Virtually Fun, Neozeed also took an actual look at Microsoft OS/2 2.0, carefully recreating that screenshot from PC Magazine in May 1990. He even managed to get some Windows 2 programs running, although this preview release did not yet have a Windows subsystem. On his Internet Archive page, he has disk images and downloadable virtual machines so that you can run this yourself under VMware or 86Box.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Wired article: The U.S. economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech -- a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot, new thing -- some people whose days as fresh-faced coders are long gone say that having decades of experience can feel like a disadvantage. Ageism is a longtime problem in the tech industry. Database startup RelevantDB went viral in 2021 after it posted a job listing bragging, "We hire old people," which played off industry stereotypes. In 2020, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that IBMhad engaged in age discrimination, pushing out older workers to make room for younger ones. (The company has denied engaging in "systemic age discrimination.") A recent LinkedIn ad that shows an older woman unfamiliar with tech jargon saying her son sells invisible clouds triggered a backlash from people who say it unfairly portrayed older people as out of touch. In response, Jim Habig, LinkedIn's vice president of marketing, says: "This ad didn't meet our goal to create experiences where all professionals feel welcomed and valued, and we are working to replace the spot." [...]

Tech companies have laid off more than 400,000 workers over the past two years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the industry. To older workers, the purge is both a reminder of the dotcom bust, and a new frontier. The industry's generally consistent growth in recent decades as the economy has become more tech-centric means that many more senior workers -- which in tech can sometimes be considered to mean over 35 but includes people in their late forties, fifties, or sixties -- may have less experience with job hunting. For decades, tech workers could easily hop between jobs in their networks, often poached by recruiters. And as tech companies boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic's early days, increased demand for skills gave workers leverage. Now the power has shifted to the employers as companies seek to become efficient and correct that over hiring phase, and applicants are hitting walls. Workers have to network, stay active on LinkedIn, join message boards, and stand out. With four generations now clocking in to work, things can feel crowded.

Paul Kunert writes in an exclusive report for The Register: IBM is asking staff who want to take voluntary redundancy to raise their hand as it embarks on a new round of global job cuts, though roles in Europe and within a handful of departments are expected to shoulder the brunt. The Resource Action, as Big Blue likes to euphemistically refer to layoffs, shouldn't be a massive surprise to anyone with more than a passing interest in IBM as it was signaled last month in a Q4 earnings call. Insiders told us this latest process is not considered to be financial but "transformative," although IBM was quite clear in January when CFO James Kavanaugh discussed achieving "$3 billion annual run rate in savings by the end of 2024." This is a third bigger than the initial ambition. The Reg understands that 80 percent of the reduction target is aimed at Enterprise Operations & Support (EO&S) and Q2C missions, Finance & Operations (including Procurement, CIO, HR, Marketing & Comms and Global Real Estate).

The European Works Council, one IBMer told us, has informed staff that circa 50 percent of IBM's reduction goal will impact staffing levels across the European continent. As if often the preferred route, IBM is seeking employees that are happy to take voluntary redundancy, rather than ditching someone that doesn't want to leave. The sources we spoke to did not reveal the total population in scope for redundancies or the numbers of volunteers being sought. IBM did not confirm the numbers either. [...] Slovakia, we're told, is to feel the tightest squeeze with around a third of IBM's cuts in Europe landing on its International (shared services) Center in Bratislava; the Center in Hungary that supports EO&S/ Q2C, as well as the Finance function in Bulgaria are also going to absorb what our sources described as the most dramatic staff reductions.

Twenty tech companies working on AI said Friday they had signed a "pledge" to try to prevent their software from interfering in elections, including in the United States. From a report: The signatories range from tech giants such as Microsoft and Google to a small startup that allows people to make fake voices -- the kind of generative-AI product that could be abused in an election to create convincing deepfakes of a candidate. The accord is, in effect, a recognition that the companies' own products create a lot of risk in a year in which 4 billion people around the world are expected to vote in elections.

"Deceptive AI Election content can deceive the public in ways that jeopardize the integrity of electoral processes," the document reads. The accord is also a recognition that lawmakers around the world haven't responded very quickly to the swift advancements in generative AI, leaving the tech industry to explore self-regulation. "As society embraces the benefits of AI, we have a responsibility to help ensure these tools don't become weaponized in elections," Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, said in a statement. The 20 companies to sign the pledge are: Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Arm, ElevenLabs, Google, IBM, Inflection AI, LinkedIn, McAfee, Meta, Microsoft, Nota, OpenAI, Snap, Stability AI, TikTok, TrendMicro, Truepic and X.

New York City's public schools chancellor said the city did not pass Tuesday's remote learning "test" due to technical issues. From a report: "As I said, this was a test. I don't think that we passed this test," David Banks said during a news briefing, adding that he felt "disappointed, frustrated and angry" as a result of the technical issues. NYC Public Schools did a lot of work to prepare for the remote learning day, Banks said, but shortly before 8 a.m. they were notified that parents and students were having difficulty signing onto remote learning.

This is the first time NYC Public Schools has implemented remote learning on a snow day since introducing the no snow day policy in 2022. The district serves 1.1 million students in more than 1,800 schools. Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city's remote learning program. "IBM was not ready for primetime," Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school. IBM has since expanded their capacity and a total of 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said. "We'll work harder to do better next time," he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong.

Jakub Lewkowicz reports via SD Times: The Linux Foundation has recently launched the Post-Quantum Cryptography Alliance (PQCA), a collaborative effort aimed at advancing and facilitating the adoption of post-quantum cryptography in response to the emerging threats of quantum computing. This alliance assembles diverse stakeholders, including industry leaders, researchers, and developers, focusing on creating high-assurance software implementations of standardized algorithms. The initiative is also dedicated to supporting the development and standardization of new post-quantum cryptographic methods, aligning with U.S. National Security Agency's guidelines to ensure cryptographic security against quantum computing threats.

The PQCA endeavors to serve as a pivotal resource for organizations and open-source projects in search of production-ready libraries and packages, fostering cryptographic agility in anticipation of future quantum computing capabilities. Founding members include AWS, Cisco, Google, IBM, IntellectEU, Keyfactor, Kudelski IoT, NVIDIA, QuSecure, SandboxAQ, and the University of Waterloo. [...] [T]he PQCA plans to launch the PQ Code Package Project aimed at creating high-assurance, production-ready software implementations of upcoming post-quantum cryptography standards, beginning with the ML-KEM algorithm. By inviting organizations and individuals to participate, the PQCA is poised to play a critical role in the transition to and standardization of post-quantum cryptography, ensuring enhanced security measures in the face of advancing quantum computing technology. You can learn more about the PQCA on its website or GitHub.

Benj Edwards reports via Ars Technica: In a move that marks the end of an era, New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over three decades, the archive has been a key resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its successors, which once competed fiercely with Microsoft Windows. In a statement made to The Register, a representative of NMSU wrote, "We have made the difficult decision to no longer host these files on hobbes.nmsu.edu. Although I am unable to go into specifics, we had to evaluate our priorities and had to make the difficult decision to discontinue the service."

Hobbes is hosted by the Department of Information & Communication Technologies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In the official announcement, the site reads, "After many years of service, hobbes.nmsu.edu will be decommissioned and will no longer be available. As of April 15th, 2024, this site will no longer exist." The earliest record we've found of the Hobbes archive online is this 1992 Walnut Creek CD-ROM collection that gathered up the contents of the archive for offline distribution. At around 32 years old, minimum, that makes Hobbes one of the oldest software archives on the Internet, akin to the University of Michigan's archives and ibiblio at UNC.

IBM delivered a companywide ultimatum to managers who are still working remotely: move near an office or leave the company. From a report: All US managers must immediately report to an office or client location at least three days a week "regardless of current work location status," according to a memo sent on Jan. 16 viewed by Bloomberg. Badge-in data will be used to "assess individual presence" and shared with managers and human resources, Senior Vice President John Granger wrote in the note. Those working remotely, other than employees with exceptions such as medical issues or military service, who don't live close enough to commute to a facility must relocate near an IBM office by the start of August, according to the memo. Managers who don't agree to relocate and are unable to secure a role that's approved to be remote must "separate from IBM," Granger wrote.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: IBM mainframes were the original onsite private cloud," begins retired software engineer Billy Newport in Is Cloud the New Mainframe? And while there were many things to like about the mainframe (including "crazy high availability numbers which today's cloud vendors can only dream of"), cost was not one of them. "As the application usage grows," Newport explains, "the bill grows and the control of the bill is largely in IBM's hands. You use more, you pay more [...] Unfortunately, while compute is elastic, budgets are not [...] Inevitably, customers try to migrate workloads from the mainframe to 'cheaper' platforms but these projects can be very expensive to do and they do fail more often than people realize."

"Today's Cloud kind of looks exactly the same as the mainframe scenario," Newport warns. "Companies have rushed to get on the cloud with the cool kids. I predict many companies will try to rush to reduce cloud expenditure and will find migrating onsite to be an expensive proposition if it's even possible.

Loughborough University will use holographic tech to beam in guest lecturers from around the globe, allowing students to interact with top international experts without leaving campus. The university, the first in Europe to explore this, plans lectures from MIT scientists and tests where management students tackle tricky situations under the guidance of industry leaders. Students have welcomed the lifelike holograms as more engaging than Zoom, The Guardian reports. Following a pilot scheme in 2024, the technology will likely become part of the formal curriculum in 2025. The box-based units are sold by California's Proto, whose clients include BT and IBM for corporate meetings. Proto's founder says the technology could even revive some of history's greatest thinkers to lecture students.

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: IBM has canceled a program that rewarded inventors at Big Blue for patents or publications, leaving some angry that they are missing out on potential bonuses. By cancelling the scheme, a source told The Register, IBM has eliminated a financial liability by voiding the accrued, unredeemed credits issued to program participants which could have been converted into potential cash awards. For years, IBM has sponsored an "Invention Achievement Award Plan" to incentivize employee innovation. In exchange for filing patents, or for publishing articles that served as defense against rival patents, IBM staff were awarded points that led to recognition and potentially cash bonuses. According to documentation seen by The Register, "Invention points are awarded to all inventors listed on a successful disclosure submission."

One point was awarded for publishing. Three points were awarded for filing a patent or four if the filing was deemed high value. For accruing 12 points, program participants would get a payout. "Inventors reach an invention plateau for every 12 points they achieve -- which must include at least one file decision," the rules state. And for each plateau achieved, IBM would pay its inventors $1,200 in recognition of their efforts. No longer, it seems. IBM canceled the program at the end of 2023 and replaced it with a new one that uses a different, incompatible point system called BluePoints.

"The previous Invention Achievement Award Plan will be sunset at midnight (eastern time) on December 31st, 2023," company FAQs explain. "Since Plateau awards are one of the items being sunset, plateau levels must be obtained on or before December 31, 2023 to be eligible for the award. Any existing plateau points that have not been applied will not be converted to BluePoints." We're told that IBM's invention review process could take months, meaning that employees just didn't have time between the announcement and the program sunset to pursue the next plateau and cash out. Those involved in the program evidently were none too pleased by the points grab. "My opinion...the invention award program was buggered a long time [ago]," said a former IBM employee. "It rewarded words on a page instead of true innovation. [Former CEO] Ginni [Rometty] made it worse by advocating the program to fluff up young egos."

Kirkman14 writes: Josh Renaud of breakintochat.com has recovered two early examples of "artificial creativity" software for the Commodore Amiga that generate new music by recombining patterns extracted from existing music. Developed by cartoonist Ya'akov Kirschen and his Israeli software firm LKP Ltd. in 1986-87, "Computer Composer" demo and "Magic Harp" baroque were early attempts at AI-like autonomous music generation.

Kirschen's technology was used to help score a BBC TV documentary in 1988, and was covered by the New York Times and other major newspapers. None of the Amiga software was ever sold, though the technology was ported to PC and published under the name "The Music Creator" in 1989.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, the quantum computing startup Quera laid out a road map that will bring error correction to quantum computing in only two years and enable useful computations using it by 2026, years ahead of when IBM plans to offer the equivalent. Normally, this sort of thing should be dismissed as hype. Except the company is Quera, which is a spinoff of the Harvard University lab that demonstrated the ability to identify and manage errors using hardware that's similar in design to what Quera is building. Also notable: Quera uses the same type of qubit that a rival startup, Atom Computing, has already scaled up to over 1,000 qubits. So, while the announcement should be viewed cautiously -- several companies have promised rapid scaling and then failed to deliver -- there are some reasons it should be viewed seriously as well. [...]

As our earlier coverage described, the Harvard lab where the technology behind Quera's hardware was developed has already demonstrated a key step toward error correction. It created logical qubits from small collections of atoms, performed operations on them, and determined when errors occurred (those errors were not corrected in these experiments). But that work relied on operations that are relatively easy to perform with trapped atoms: two qubits were superimposed, and both were exposed to the same combination of laser lights, essentially performing the same manipulation on both simultaneously. Unfortunately, only a subset of the operations that are likely to be desired for a calculation can be done that way. So, the road map includes a demonstration of additional types of operations in 2024 and 2025. At the same time, the company plans to rapidly scale the number of qubits. Its goal for 2024 hasn't been settled on yet, but [Quera's Yuval Boger] indicated that the goal is unlikely to be much more than double the current 256. By 2025, however, the road map calls for over 3,000 qubits and over 10,000 a year later. This year's small step will add pressure to the need for progress in the ensuing years.

If things go according to plan, the 3,000-plus qubits of 2025 can be combined to produce 30 logical qubits, meaning about 100 physical qubits per logical one. This allows fairly robust error correction schemes and has undoubtedly been influenced by Quera's understanding of the error rate of its current atomic qubits. That's not enough to perform any algorithms that can't be simulated on today's hardware, but it would be more than sufficient to allow people to get experience with developing software using the technology. (The company will also release a logical qubit simulator to help here.) Quera will undoubtedly use this system to develop its error correction process -- Boger indicated that the company expected it would be transparent to the user. In other words, people running operations on Quera's hardware can submit jobs knowing that, while they're running, the system will be handling the error correction for them. Finally, the 2026 machine will enable up to 100 logical qubits, which is expected to be sufficient to perform useful calculations, such as the simulation of small molecules. More general-purpose quantum computing will need to wait for higher qubit counts still.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Microsoft's MS-DOS (and its IBM-branded counterpart, PC DOS) eventually became software juggernauts, powering the vast majority of PCs throughout the '80s and serving as the underpinnings of Windows throughout the '90s. But the software had humble beginnings, as we've detailed in our history of the IBM PC and elsewhere. It began in mid-1980 as QDOS, or "Quick and Dirty Operating System," the work of developer Tim Paterson at a company called Seattle Computer Products (SCP). It was later renamed 86-DOS, after the Intel 8086 processor, and this was the version that Microsoft licensed and eventually purchased.

Last week, Internet Archive user f15sim discovered and uploaded a new-old version of 86-DOS to the Internet Archive. Version 0.1-C of 86-DOS is available for download here and can be run using the SIMH emulator; before this, the earliest extant version of 86-DOS was version 0.34, also uploaded by f15sim. This version of 86-DOS is rudimentary even by the standards of early-'80s-era DOS builds and includes just a handful of utilities, a text-based chess game, and documentation for said chess game. But as early as it is, it remains essentially recognizable as the DOS that would go on to take over the entire PC business. If you're just interested in screenshots, some have been posted by user NTDEV on the site that used to be Twitter.

According to the version history available on Wikipedia, this build of 86-DOS would date back to roughly August of 1980, shortly after it lost the "QDOS" moniker. By late 1980, SCP was sharing version 0.3x of the software with Microsoft, and by early 1981, it was being developed as the primary operating system of the then-secret IBM Personal Computer. By the middle of 1981, roughly a year after 86-DOS began life as QDOS, Microsoft had purchased the software outright and renamed it MS-DOS. Microsoft and IBM continued to co-develop MS-DOS for many years; the version IBM licensed and sold on its PCs was called PC DOS, though for most of their history the two products were identical. Microsoft also retained the ability to license the software to other computer manufacturers as MS-DOS, which contributed to the rise of a market of mostly interoperable PC clones. The PC market as we know it today still more or less resembles the PC-compatible market of the mid-to-late 1980s, albeit with dramatically faster and more capable components.