23 years ago today (1986)

23 years ago, I was working on finishing MS-DOS 4.0 and transitioning to work on MS-DOS 4.1.  We also moved from the original Northup campus to the brand new 4 building campus herein Redmond.  At the time the company mandated that we give up our President’s Day holiday and instead replace it with the day we moved to the new campus.  Needless to say this did not go over well.  I still remember one of my co-workers sending an email comparing John Shirley (president at the time) with Pope Gregory.

For me this didn’t matter because a co-worker and I ended up spending the move time in France working with Goupil to finalize a number of bugs that they had with MS-DOS 4.0 (for instance MS-DOS 4.0’s floppy driver didn’t work correctly on machines with more than 2 floppy drives (we weren’t able to test this because none of the machines we had access to had 4 floppy drives, but Goupil had a machine with 4 drives on it – if I remember correctly the issue was a confusion as to how the drive select bits on the uPD765 worked).