For several years now I’ve been trying to continue the DOS history series and write (or rather finish) a DOS 5 page. While tracing the history of DOS 1.0 or 2.0 is quite difficult and the amount of source material is very limited, with DOS 5.0 there’s the opposite problem, too much information. Way too much.
Thanks to various lawsuits, thousands of internal Microsoft documents were made public. Dozens if not hundreds are relevant to DOS 5. There are documents which outline the development plans in detail, and there’s even a fairly comprehensive post-mortem report which is a great source of information about what actually happened (as opposed to the usual Microsoft pie in the sky unrealized plans, like a DOS 5 release in late 1989).
Finding the relevant documents is not easy. Some are long e-mail dumps where only a few bits are pertinent. Others are awful scans which defeat any OCR, but are still readable by someone who has a bit of context information. There is a lot to go through.
The next problem is how to condense the huge amount of raw information into something informative, readable, and accurate, without ending up like the infamous Wikipedia FAT entry which bears no resemblance to an encyclopedia article and makes a solid argument that too much information its just as bad as too little.
But I’m trying.
