Making Utilities For MS-DOS

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Term Paper Title	Making Utilities For MS-DOS
# of Words	4238
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	16.95

Making Utilities for MS-DOS

Making Utilities for MS-DOS

     Michael Sokolov
     English 4
     Mr. Siedlecki
     February 1, 1996

Making Utilities for MS-DOS

These days, when computers play an important role in virtually all aspects of
our life, the issue of concern to many programmers is Microsoft's hiding of
technical documentation. Microsoft is by far the most important system software
developer. There can be no argument about that. Microsoft's MS-DOS operating
system has become a de facto standard (IBM's PC-DOS is actually a licensed
version of MS-DOS). And this should be so, because these systems are very well
written. The people who designed them are perhaps the best software engineers in
the world.

But making a computer platform that is a de facto standard should imply a good
deal of responsibility before the developers who make applications for that
platform. In particular, proper documentation is essential for such a platform.
Not providing enough documentation for a system that everyone uses can have
disastrous results. Think of it, an operating system is useless by itself, its
sole purpose is to provide services to applications. And who would be able to
develop applications for an operating system if the documentation for that
system is confidential and available only to the company that developed it?
Obviously, only the company that has developed that operating system will be
able to develop software for it. And this is a violation of the Antitrust Law.

And now I start having a suspicion that this is happening with Microsoft's
operating systems. It should be no secret to anyone that MS-DOS contains a lot
of undocumented system calls, data structures and other features. Numerous books
have been written on this subject (see bibliography). Many of them are vital to
system programming. There is no way to write a piece of system software, such as
a multitasker, a local area network, or another operating system extension,
without knowing this undocumented functionality in MS-DOS. And, sure enough,
Microsoft is using this functionality extensively when developing operating
system extensions. For example, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Network, and
Microsoft CD-ROM Extensions (MSCDEX) rely heavily on the undocumented internals
of MS-DOS.

The reader can ask, "Why do they leave functionality undocumented?" To answer
that question, we should look at what this "functionality" actually is. In MS-
DOS, the undocumented "functionality" is actually th...

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