[1] https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/03/microsoft-o...
Or on the GitHub clone (162 points, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47946813
> This source code is old enough that it hadn’t been stored digitally. “A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini,” calling itself the “DOS Disassembly Group,” painstakingly transcribed and scanned in code from paper printouts provided by Paterson. This process was made even more difficult because modern OCR software struggled with the quality of the decades-old printout.
I've been able to OCR letter-quality printer output to 97% (mostly Os and Xs problems).
But it seems that machine-learning text-recognition is also now biased to reject computer code because it doesn't look like human language.
barely
It sounds like this printout has deteriorated badly and was barely readable.
Microsoft open sources DOS 1.00 on 45th anniversary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957494 - April 2026 (19 comments)
I remember in the naughts, coming across a dos machine that was quite out of time… even for the university basement it was living in next to a pile of lead brick. Its only job was to run an instrument via an home-built ISA card and write data out to 5.25” floppies.
What uses would this code have in 2026?