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Wendin-DOS : The forgotten multi-tasking, multi-user DOS clone from the 1980s
Produced by a small team, and lost to the sands of time... until now.
August 18, 2023
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Back in 1987, an MS-DOS compatible operating system debuted that — despite a truly impressive and fascinating feature set — has been all but lost to history: Wendin-DOS.

This wasn’t some simple DOS clone, either. Wendin-DOS was a multitasking, multi-user DOS with the ability to run individual applications in movable windows.

Yet, sadly, there is almost no information available on the history and development of this fascinating system.

Let’s remedy that.

I managed to track down the developer of Wendin-DOS, Steve Jones, to find out as much as I could about the history of the system.

The Wendin-DOS story begins, as so many stories do, with a young nerd… playing with computers in High School…

Steve Jones: “The moment I saw an ASR33 teletype, I knew what I wanted to do. In high school, I spent more time programming a Univac 70/7 (IBM 360 clone) than anything else. Studied the operating system, wrote a disassembler to reveal how it worked, and wrote a bunch of system-oriented software for it.

In college I got a job with the academic computer center and studied its operating system, as well as the up-and-coming VAX/VMS. I started learning about what Dave Cutler was doing and wished I could work with him.”

For those unaware: Dave Cutler is an absolute legend in the operating system world, having been one of the engineers responsible for VMS, and would later go on to lead the NT project at Microsoft.

Now that Steve was out of school, things started to get really interesting…

“After college, I started a software company in Spokane that operated in the same building as my parents' company, Jones Double-Reed Products. My brother Greg joined me, and together we cloned VAX/VMS (well, as well as we were able), added a PC API module (we called it "the Filter", which included INT 20h-2fh redirection and processing, as well as some other PC interrupts to achieve rerouting of BIOS calls.) We hired Scott, a local software engineer, to help us, and put him on the filter-- toughest job, since it was basically a compatibility layer for all the DOS stuff out there. I can't tell you how many times Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were causing him fits. Then we split it up, Greg took the VMS shell and utilities, and I took the kernel-- which was really just VAX/VMS, with 4 stacks per process, ASTs, QIO, RMS, the whole thing.”

Three engineers, in Spokane Washington, who built a VMS clone for x86 PCs.

Already quite cool… and then this little rag-tag team decided to do something even cooler… they built an “Operating System Toolbox”.

“We got the idea to just replace the shell and utilities to make other operating systems-- PCUNIX (later renamed to PCNX when AT&T sent us a letter), and finally, stripped them off to create Operating System Toolbox, which was just the source, in a toolkit that people could use to create their own shell and utilities around the kernel. We ended up selling about 400 copies of each of these things a month as I recall, in response to ads in Dr Dobbs, BYTE, Embedded Systems Programming and a few others.

An open source (before people really used the term regularly) kit for building a multitasking operating system. Plus a VMS clone and UNIX clone for IBM compatible PCs.

From the 1987 Wendin catalog

Think about that for a moment. It’s 1986. And there’s a UNIX clone, for IBM PCs, that (via the Operating System Toolbox) has some of the source code available for it. This was a full half decade before Linus Torvalds would start the Linux kernel project.

This is some mightily impressive stuff here.

PCUNIX advertisement. Dr. Dobbs Journal, July 1986.

This tiny little company now had two complete operating systems (plus the Operating System Toolbox). Which is where DOS enters the story…

“With so many people wanting an alternative to MS-DOS (one that was bootable from a disk, not runnable as a program from DOS)-- we did another round of development and created Wendin-DOS, 'the DOS of the future.'

 

We were able to demonstrate running real DOS apps in overlapping, character-oriented windows, as well as screen groups, ala the up-and-coming Microsoft OS/2.”

From the 1987 Wendin catalog

Wendin-DOS certainly seemed to generate a good amount of interest from the press back in 1987.

InfoWorld, November 1987

Of course, being a small company and supporting three different operating systems has some significant challenges. Namely: testing the system with a wide variety of software. The Wendin crew did a little outside the box thinking on that…

“Once we had the basic software going, we realized if we were going to compete with Microsoft, we would need testers. Since we didn't have the money for our own, we created a debugging contest, and each person got an "I Debugged The DOS Of The Future" mug, plus a large prize for the winners. The bug reports flooded in, but the winner was astounding-- he submitted a ream (500 pg) of paper, with each page containing a bug report describing the nature of the problem, how to reproduce it, a diagnosis of the problem and suggested fix; this thing was just off the charts great. Turned out, he was institutionalized in some way and couldn't really go get a job, so he had time on his hands.”

According to the July 1987 issue of “80 Micro” (a Tandy oriented magazine) the Wendin crew even traveled to the famous West Coast Computer Faire to demonstrate Wendin-DOS.

Updates to Wendin-DOS were worked on for a while after the first release shipped…

InfoWorld, May 1988

But, not long after Wendin-DOS hit the market, Steve Jones (and his brother) left the company and headed off to work at Microsoft. At which point Wendin-DOS (along with the Operating System Toolbox, PC/VMS, and PCUNIX) all quickly faded into obscurity.

Wendin-DOS advertisement in Dr. Dobb's Journal, August 1987.

What could Wendin-DOS (along with PC/VMS and PCUNIX) have become had they had a few more years to mature with the original team? We’ll never know… but, considering the amazing accomplishments from that small team (in such a short period of time)… my guess? It would have knocked our socks off.

Epilogue

Steve Jones would go on to eventually become the CTO for BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies. Along the way — immediately after stopping work on Wendin-DOS — he spent some time over at Microsoft working working for the very engineer that inspired him back in High School.

“I got to work for Dave Cutler and really feel like I apprenticed with him-- it was a fantastic experience, working for the MAN.”

And Dave Cutler wasn’t the only computer pioneer that Steve ended up rubbing shoulders with…

Funny little story-- as I roamed the Microsoft hallways in building 2 on my first day, I ran into Larry Osterman's office with his bulletin board outside. On that bulletin board was posted our Wendin "love letter", which was something we sent out because we were delaying shipment of Wendin-DOS while we were processing all those bugs. On the form letter, Larry had written, "Guess writing a DOS is harder than you thought!" Not surprising, since Larry wrote DOS 4, the multitasking version of MS-DOS that never really went anywhere but was pretty ambitious at the time. We were largely solving the same problems, though he had full MS-DOS 3.31 source code (a great version of DOS) and we had our debugger to work with. Larry and I had a good laugh about it. Tim Paterson, the original 86-DOS implementer, had an office across the hall.”

Editors note: I had the good pleasure of interacting with Tim Paterson back in the 1990s, when we both worked at Microsoft. I was a young nerd, he was the software legend responsible for building the original “Quick and Dirty Operating System” that would go on to become “MS-DOS”. He was incredibly kind and gracious.

Many thanks to Steve for writing up some of this history and sharing his thoughts. It is so important that this amazing — and fascinating — part of computer history be properly documented. While there is still much to record about the work of this team, this is a good start.

Nowadays, Steve Jones runs NeuroSynthetica in Seattle, WA.

Can I run Wendin-DOS in 2022?

You can, indeed, run Wendin-DOS in emulation on modern machines. I was able to boot version 2.11 inside VirtualBox:

Wendin-DOS 2.11 booting off a floppy

Note: Wendin DOS 2.11 can be found in a few corners of the Internet. Due to uncertain legal status of the software, I can't link to it directly.

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Funny Programming Pictures Part LIV
The Roman Numerals makes ‘em fancy.

Fun fact: I hit CTRL-C at least 7 times when copying each of these pictures.

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Mount a drive image from a remote server... on DOS.
Want your D:\ to point to an image running on a Linux box across the world? Yeah, you do.

I'm a sucker for software which makes aging operating systems more useful.  As such, I am absolutely enamored with a new DOS utiltity called "mTCP NetDrive".

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What's more, the local DOS system simply recognizes the mounted drive as a standard hard drive (mounted as a configurable drive letter).  Which means that just about any software should work on it without difficulty.

Even disk management and optimization tools, like Norton Utilities, work fantastically.

 

 

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September 05, 2024
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The Internet Archive Loses Appeal. As Expected.
With more legal action on the horizon, how long before Archive.org closes?

The United States Court of Appeals (Second Circuit) just issued a ruling against the Internet Archive (Archive.org) -- rejecting their appeal, and upholding a previous ruling against them in the Hachette vs Internet Archive legal battle.

Make no mistake: This is very bad news for both the Internet Archive, Archive.org users, as well as other archival projects.

 

 

 

Hachette v. Internet Archive: The Short, Short Version

 

To make sure everyone is up to speed, here is the short, short version of this legal battle.

For many years, the Internet Archive has been creating digital copies of physical books (by scanning them) -- then allowing people to "borrow" those digital versions from Archive.org (in theory limiting the total digital books being "lent out" to the count of the physical books in the Archive's possession).

They never obtained permissions from the authors or publishers to do any of this.

In 2020, during the Covid lockdowns, the Internet Archive launched the "National Emergency Library" -- where they removed that "1 physical book : 1 digital book lent out" restriction.  Meaning anybody on the Internet could obtain digital scans of physical books... and the Archive could "Lend Out" an unlimited number of digital copies based on a single physical copy.

Again.  No permission was obtained from the writers or publishers.

Thus -- to the surprise of absolutely nobody -- the "Hachette v. Internet Archive" legal battle began.

And... The Internet Archive lost.  The judge ruled in favor of the publishers (including Hachette, Wiley, Penguin Random House, & HarperCollins).

Naturally, Internet Archive appealed that ruling.  But, boy-howdy, was their appeal a strange one which was destined to fail.

 

The Strange Appeal of The Internet Archive

 

On April 19th of 2024, the Internet Archive filed their final brief in their attempt to appeal this ruling against them.

In that ruling, one of the Internet Archive's core arguments was that it cost the Internet Archive a lot of money to make so many digital copies of books without permission... so, therefore, the Internet Archive should be allowed to do it.

That is neither a joke nor an exaggeration.  It sounds weird, because it is weird.

The Internet Archive truly attempted to make the case that spending a lot of money committing a crime... should make that crime legal.  (Could you imagine the mafia making that case?  Wild.)

You can read the full analysis, by The Lunduke Journal, of the appeal (including the appeal itself) for yourself for more details.

The reality is... there was never any chance that the Internet Archive's attempted appeal was going to be successful.  Their defensive arguments were highly illogical (bordering on flights of fancy), and brought nothing new or noteworthy to the case.  This was all painfully obvious.

 

The Lost Appeal

 

On Wednesday, September 4th, 2024, the opinion was handed down from the United States Court of Appeals.

While the full ruling is roughly 64 pages long, this single paragraph -- from the second page -- summarizes things quite well:

 

"This appeal presents the following question: Is it “fair use” for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no. We therefore AFFIRM."

 

To call out the truly important parts:

"Question: Is it 'fair use' ... to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free ... all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? ... we conclude the answer is no."

You can read the entire 64 page ruling for yourself.  Heck.  You can even read it on Archive.org.  But that line, right there, sums it all up.

Naturally, the Internet Archive has issued a statement.  Albeit... a short one.

 

"We are disappointed in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere. We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books."

 

What Happens Now?

 

The Internet Archive gets sued by some of the biggest book publishers... and loses.

The Internet Archive appeals... and loses.

What happens next?  Well.  Unfortunately -- for both the Internet Archive, and its users -- the future looks rather bleak.

First and foremost: Has the Internet Archive made, and distributed, digital copies of work you own?  This ruling will certainly not hurt your case should you decide to take legal action against Archive.org.

And -- holy smokes -- the amount of copyrighted material on Archive.org is absolutely massive.

The Archive.org software repository alone contains millions of items.  With a very large number of them being copyrighted material, posted there without permission of the copyright owner.

Simply going by the numbers, here's how much material is available on Archive.org (roughly):

  • 832 Billion archived webpages.
  • 38 Million printed materials (magazines, books, etc.).
  • 2.6 Million pieces of software
  • 11.6 Million videos files.
  • 15 Million audio files.
  • 4.7 Million images.

How many of those items do you think are there without permission (or possibly even knowledge) of the owners or creators?

Every single one now has an increasingly strong case when looking at potential legal action.

And it's about to get even worse for the Internet Archive.

 

UMG Recordings v. Internet Archive

 

That's right, the book publishers weren't the only ones taking legal action against Archive.org. 

Universal Music Group and Sony have an ongoing lawsuit against the Internet Archive -- regarding the distribution of 2,749 audio recordings (with potential damages upwards of $412 Million USD).

Seriously.

 

"Plaintiffs bring this suit to address Defendants’ massive ongoing violation of Plaintiffs’ rights in protected pre-1972 sound recordings. As part of what Defendants have dubbed the “Great 78 Project,” Internet Archive, Blood, and GBLP have willfully reproduced thousands of Plaintiffs’ protected sound recordings without authorization by copying physical records into digital files. Internet Archive then willfully uploaded, distributed, and digitally transmitted those illegally copied sound recordings millions of times from Internet Archive’s website."

 

Sound familiar?  Digital copies.  No permission from the artists or publishers.  Free downloads for everyone.

Naturally, the Internet Archive attempted to have this suit dismissed... but their attempt was denied in May of 2024.  (Because if there's one constant in life... it's that the Internet Archive always loses in court.)  That case is going forward.

 

 

What happens if the Internet Archive loses this UMG / Sony case?  What happens if they are ordered to pay $412 Million in damages?

To put it simply: Archive.org doesn't have that kind of money.  They bring in roughly $20 Million (give or take) per year.  That type of legal liability would absolutely destroy the Internet Archive.

 

 

And, here's the thing, the Internet Archive is almost assuredly going to lose that lawsuit as well.

Regardless of what you, I, or anyone else thinks of the Internet Archive -- and, make no mistake, I use that service several times a week (and love it) -- the law here is incredibly clear and well tested.

The Internet Archive runs one of the largest (if not the largest) website of pirated and stolen digital material on the planet.  Sure, it may also provide extremely valuable (and often, very legal) services as well.. but that doesn't make those crimes go away.

With each legal defeat, the Internet Archive grows increasingly vulnerable to additional attacks.

Simply being logical about it... it seems highly likely that we'll see additional suits brought against the Internet Archive in the months ahead.  Books, music, TV shows, software... Archive.org contains a massive mountain of copyrighted material in all areas.  These are suits which the Internet Archive would be almost certain to lose.

With this reality looming, how long until Archive.org will be forced to shut down entirely?  That day is likely not far off... and a sad day it will be.

 

The Archive Had to Know This Was Coming

 

The truly sad part?  The leadership of the Internet Archive had to know exactly what they were doing.

Every step of the way, it was obvious that they were going to lock horns with publishers (and lose).

Heck, I told them.  Repeatedly.

But, even if The Lunduke Journal hadn't pointed this out... it was a brutally obvious certainty to anyone even mildly familiar with copyright law and the workings of Archive.org.

Which means: The Internet Archive knowingly put their entire service at risk (including the Wayback Machine, the massive archive or pre-copyright audio recordings, etc.) because they wanted to publish copyrighted material against the wishes of the authors or publishers.

Despite this, they continue to push a public perception campaign where they pretend that publishers and authors are burning their own books.  When the reality is... the books are still available a wide variety of ways.  Archive.org simply got in trouble for copying and distributing them without permission.

 

 

Something I find truly fascinating about all of this, is that The Lunduke Journal will -- as usual -- get yelled at (rather extensively) for this article.  For simply pointing out the current reality of copyright law and how the Internet Archive has, knowingly, violated it.

People love Archive.org.  Heck, I love Archive.org.

And people are allowing their love for that website to convince them that anyone being critical of it... must, necessarily, be bad and evil.  An enemy.

But it is not The Lunduke Journal who is putting The Internet Archive in danger of being shut down.

Neither is it Sony, Hachette, Random House, or HarperCollins who are putting The Internet Archive in danger.

No, sir.

The only one putting The Internet Archive in danger... is The Internet Archive.

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