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Birth of 86-DOS

https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/birth-of-86-dos
46•rbanffy•3d ago

Comments

nsxwolf•7h ago
I don’t remember anyone saying or writing “eighters” and “sixers” back then.
rbanffy•7h ago
Me neither. Could be something local. We didn't have many magazines or BBSs to unify informal language.
cardiffspaceman•1h ago
I read this notion a while ago, perhaps in IEEE Spectrum or something. I didn’t use the terms very much because I didn’t hear them.
aabajian•7h ago
The last line is the most interesting, "In October 1980, Microsoft's Paul Allen contacted Seattle Computer Products and expressed interest in reselling 86-DOS. The first version of 86-DOS licensed to Microsoft was 0.3. In July 1981, just a month before IBM PC was announced, 86-DOS was sold to Microsoft and renamed to MS-DOS."

IBM reached out to Microsoft sometime in 1980 about an operating system, so SCP would've had at least 8 months to look into why Microsoft wanted their DOS before selling it entirely to them.

Did Microsoft resell 86-DOS to anybody before changing the name to MS-DOS? Did SCP make any effort find out why Microsoft wanted their DOS?

tonyedgecombe•6h ago
> Did SCP make any effort find out why Microsoft wanted their DOS?

We know that if Bill Gates comes calling you should be suspicious. It wasn’t such common knowledge back then.

slipheen•4h ago
It has been reported that IBM made a deal with Microsoft in part because the chairman of IBM was friends with Bill Gates’s mother.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influe...

It is likely that no other company could’ve gotten the same deal.

Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

698•rickybule•8h ago•400 comments

Python: The Documentary

https://lwn.net/Articles/1035537/
25•chmaynard•1h ago•2 comments

Fuck up my site – Turn any website into beautiful chaos

https://www.fuckupmysite.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com&torchCursor=true&comicSans=t...
130•coloneltcb•3h ago•40 comments

Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

https://martinfowler.com/articles/202508-ai-thoughts.html
174•floverfelt•5h ago•159 comments

My startup banking story (2023)

https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-startup-banking-story
155•dvrp•5h ago•66 comments

Uncertain<T>

https://nshipster.com/uncertainty/
236•samtheprogram•7h ago•50 comments

Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people

https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx
44•scapecast•3h ago•9 comments

Expert LSP the official language server implementation for Elixir

https://github.com/elixir-lang/expert
46•pimienta•3h ago•8 comments

RSS Is Awesome

https://evanverma.com/rss-is-awesome
58•edverma2•1h ago•12 comments

Building your own CLI coding agent with Pydantic-AI

https://martinfowler.com/articles/build-own-coding-agent.html
102•vinhnx•6h ago•21 comments

TuneD is a system tuning service for Linux

https://tuned-project.org/
27•tanelpoder•3d ago•8 comments

Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?

https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-really-losing-money-on-inference/
431•martinald•14h ago•414 comments

AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/generative-ai-reshapes-us-job-market-stanford-study-shows-entry-l...
169•pseudolus•10h ago•260 comments

Rupert's Property

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2025/08/28/a-polyhedron-without-ruperts-property/
19•robinhouston•2h ago•1 comments

Launch HN: Dedalus Labs (YC S25) – Vercel for Agents

43•windsor•8h ago•11 comments

A forgotten medieval fruit with a vulgar name (2021)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210325-the-strange-medieval-fruit-the-world-forgot
65•ohjeez•1d ago•27 comments

Dependent types I › Universes, or types of types

https://www.jonmsterling.com/01ET/index.xml
7•matt_d•1d ago•0 comments

Bad Craziness

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15191
13•jjgreen•1h ago•2 comments

You no longer need JavaScript: an overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome

https://lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js/
82•todsacerdoti•4h ago•28 comments

Thrashing

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2025/08/26/thrashing/
12•pch00•1d ago•1 comments

Speed-coding for the 6502 – a simple example

https://www.colino.net/wordpress/en/archives/2025/08/28/speed-coding-for-the-6502-a-simple-example/
18•mmphosis•3h ago•7 comments

Will AI Replace Human Thinking? The Case for Writing and Coding Manually

https://www.ssp.sh/brain/will-ai-replace-humans/
110•articsputnik•10h ago•89 comments

VLT observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS II

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18382
44•bikenaga•6h ago•32 comments

Optimising for maintainability – Gleam in production at Strand

https://gleam.run/case-studies/strand/
87•Bogdanp•9h ago•21 comments

Show HN: SwiftAI – open-source library to easily build LLM features on iOS/macOS

https://github.com/mi12labs/SwiftAI
52•mi12-root•10h ago•11 comments

Web Bot Auth

https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/reference/bot-verification/web-bot-auth/
38•ananddtyagi•6h ago•37 comments

RFC 8594: The Sunset HTTP Header Field (2019)

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8594
24•aiven•5h ago•9 comments

I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%

https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop
9•rbanffy•37m ago•6 comments

In Search of AI Psychosis

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-search-of-ai-psychosis
84•venkii•2d ago•48 comments

That boolean should probably be something else

https://ntietz.com/blog/that-boolean-should-probably-be-something-else/
84•vidyesh•12h ago•94 comments