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by farmerbb 791 days ago
They force-pushed the repo to remove an insult towards Tim Patterson in one of the source files.
3 comments

They changed line 70 of v4.0/src/DOS/STRIN.ASM from [0]:

; Brain-damaged Tim Patterson ignored ^F in case his BIOS did not flush the

to [1]:

; Brain-damaged TP ignored ^F in case his BIOS did not flush the

[0] https://github.com/OwnedByWuigi/DOS/blob/ffd70f8b4fb77e2e6af...

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/DOS/S...

If Tim is still around he should PR a change back; I'd not want my name shortened to "TP".
He should make a PR to change it back to the correct spelling of his name.
Agreed. My initialisms are almost as bad. (Thanks clueless parents!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Paterson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tim Paterson (born 1 June 1956) is an American computer programmer, best known for creating 86-DOS, an operating system for the Intel 8086. This system emulated the application programming interface (API) of CP/M, which was created by Gary Kildall. 86-DOS later formed the basis of MS-DOS, the most widely used personal computer operating system in the 1980s.

If this release is for historical research purposes, the release should be pristine including the unsavory bits. Whitewashing of history should never be accepted.
Perhaps this release is not for historical research purposes.
It is for historial research purposes:

>The MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0 files were originally shared at the Computer History Museum on March 25th, 2014 and are being (re)published in this repo to make them easier to find, reference-to in external writing and works, and to allow exploration and experimentation for those interested in early PC Operating Systems.

>For historical reference

>The source files in this repo are for historical reference and will be kept static, so please don’t send Pull Requests suggesting any modifications to the source files, but feel free to fork this repo and experiment.

100%!
Don't leave us hanging!!
At https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/DOS/S... it used to have Tim Patterson's full name whereas after the force push they abbreviated it to his initials "TP".

I had the repo cloned before the force push and when I went to pull it, this file was the only one that contained a conflict.

Looks like the handiwork of Mark Zbikowski, whose initials adorn every EXE file. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zbikowski
Mark is the one that committed today's source release, going off of the "MZ is back" commit message from GitHub user "mzbik".