[intro sounds]
[jazz] I come bearing good news. Today's
sponsor, Fasthosts have gone all out, and are offering one lucky person a
dream PC setup worth up to five grand! There's a question you need to answer,
so stay tuned and I'll ask it later! Imagine it's 1992 and rather than installing a
fresh copy of MS-DOS 5.0 on your computer like a good little person, you instead opted for a rival
OS. All seemed dnady, until you went to install Windows 3.1, and then you received
THIS horrific error message. [panicked screams of disarray] Hello there, I'm Nostalgia Nerd, and
today, we're looking at the AARD Code. If you watched my last video, you may be
getting some dejavu, because we're back on the subject of Digital Research DOS.
What a time to be alive. Digital Research, once the industry leader in Operating Systems had,
by 1990, been on the back-foot for about 10 years; ever since Microsoft Gazumped them by licencing
86-DOS and making a deal with IBM to have it the cheapest choice on their IBM Personal Computer.
They had been trying to claw back steadily, but without too much success. You might think
then that Microsoft would no longer see them as a threat. Wrong. DR-DOS were still
small-fry, but from 1990 to 1991 their sales revenue doubled from $15 million to £30
million, and by the first quarter of 1992, they were set to double that, yet again. The main
driver for these sales were tech savvy PC vendors and computer magazine journalists switching to
what they deemed, a more favourable experience. To overcome Microsoft, Digital Research
had been doing the only thing they could. Make a better product. DR-DOS 5.0, released in
May 1990 was just that. It was the first DOS which allowed you to load drivers into both high
and extended memory, saving vital conventional RAM space. It also had a more pleasant
command set and generally better utilities. It's success meant that Novell would
purchase Digital Research with an agreement on the 17th July 1991, worth $80million dollars. Their plan was to heavily gear DR-DOS up for
networking, posing an even more serious threat. DR-DOS 6.0, released in September 1991, also
built upon the foundations of 5. It included the TAXMAX task switching API, for a pseudo
multitasking environment, a visual directory manager and even SuperStor's on the fly disk
compression. Something Microsoft hadn't even considered at this point. All these factors meant
that Microsoft were feeling some serious strain. Their initial response was to try and purchase
Novell, but to no avail. In fact, Novell instead made agreements with IBM to ship and promote
DR-DOS with their systems, rather than MS-DOS. Microsoft's secondary plan was therefore
to mount a somewhat more sinister plan, based around Windows. After all,
Windows was the future; THEIR future, and so in the run up to releasing Windows 3.1,
various meetings were setup and emails exchanged. // On the exact day that Novell purchased Digital
Research, Jim Allchin, who was then in charge of Microsoft's unreleased Cairo Operating
System sent out an email voicing concerns with Novell and IBM's partnership. The email
mentions speaking to Novell about their plans, about getting serious with their in-house
networking efforts, and about including getting Winball (which was the codename for Windows with
Workgroups) into Windows 3.1 as soon as possible. But it's point (G) which is most of interest; "We consider changing our apps to
not run unless the OS is our OS" This clearly sparked the imagination
of many employees within Microsoft. Shortly after Brad Silverberg would sent email
back to Jim, concurring his concerns with DR-DOS; "After IBM announces support for DR-DOS at Comdex,
my best hunch is that they will offer DR-DOS as the preferred solution. DR-DOS
has problems running Windows today, and I assume will have more
problems in the future" But the thing is, DR-DOS didn't really
have any issues running Windows at all. That last statement seemed to be making
a cloaked point, more than anything. Jim Allchin would respond "You SHOULD make
sure it has problems in the future :-)" As the Autumn weather swept in, more members of
Microsoft became convinced of this direction, and an email was sent from Microsoft's
Head of Development, David Cole; "We should surely crash the system...
the approach we will take is to detect DR DOS 6 and refuse to load. The
error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface'. Maybe
there are several very sophisticated checks so competitors get put on a treadmill...Aaron
R had some pretty wild ideas after three or so beers. Earle H has some too.... the less people
know about exactly what gets done, the better". This seemed to suggest, that if a user
happened to be running DR-DOS, a error message should appear on screen to stop
the software from operating. // Over the next two months, somewhat thanks
to those in disagreement in Microsoft, the plan changed to make the
error simply a visual one. A fabrication that did nothing more
than appear and then disappear. Microsoft's Vice President sent out an
email advising the assigned developers [the code detecting DR-DOS]"better be perfect.
Otherwise you could be in a heap of trouble" The aforementioned Aaron Reynolds set to
work implementing it... and as requested, it was cleverly hidden and thoroughly
encrypted. This DR-DOS bomb was included in the Christmas beta version of Windows 3.1. Here then, was a GUI designed to completely
elevate itself from what had gone before. Truetype fonts were added, 386 Enhanced mode was
added, up to 4GB of memory could be utilised, file manager was overhauled, icons could
be dragged and dropped for the first time and importantly, stability was
far superior to that of Windows 3. Of course, that is, unless you were
running DR-DOS, just like those PC vendors, journalists and prominent PC advisors who
thought that DR-DOS was the way forward. Until they loaded their
beta copies of Windows 3.1, and received an error message that
Microsoft DOS users just weren't getting. Did DR-DOS have some serious
problems running Windows? Of course it didn't. DR-DOS was
perfectly compatible with Windows 3.1, and the stability was as good under DR-DOS
as it was under MS-DOS. The message would appear and then vanish. But the misinformation
spread through the tech industry regardless. AS you might expect, Digital Research
and Novell were completely denied access to beta copies of Windows 3.1, but were
simply able to circumnavigate the issue by working with DR-DOS users who WERE
Windows 3.1 beta testers. Through this means, they quickly rolled out, what they called,
a Windows 3.1-compatible "business update", which bypassed the issue, and
prevented the error from displaying. This wasn't the days of on demand internet access
though. Updates weren't simply pushed out on the fly. Users could download the update from the DR
forum on Compuserve if they had access and indeed, wanted to, but the damage was done. All
this roll-out seemingly achieved, was to compound the fact that it was a Digital
Research problem, not a Microsoft one. In February 1992, Senior VP, Brad Silverberg
sent out an email to the highest ranks of Microsoft confirming the strategy;
"What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect the
problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS, or decide not to take the risk for the
other machines he has to buy in the office". and indeed, it was working. By the fourth quarter
of 1992, many manufacturers has erred on the side of caution and decided to bundle MS-DOS. sales of
DR-DOS had dropped from $15 million to only $1.4 million. Users were switching back to MS-DOS
5, or simply waiting for the newly announced MS-DOS 6.0, due in the first quarter
of 1993, disk compression included. Now of course, some people got wise
to this situation pretty quick, and in fact, by April 1992, people outside of
Microsoft were starting to document the code and its workings. Geoff Chappell
was one of those people, and if you visit his website geoffchappell.com,
he documents the discovery process in some detail. In April 1992 Geoff was emailing back and
forth with Andrew Schulman, regarding some new updates included with Windows 3.1. Namely the
Himem.sys driver, which replaces the current DOS version on installation and allows programs to
store data in Extended memory. This information was for their respective books, Undocumented
Windows, by Andrew and DOS Internals by Geoff. On the morning of the 17th April Geoff
fired off an email regarding "a large amount of really stupid code (lots wasted, some encrypted
with XOR)" in Himem 3.03. By the evening, he had written a procedure to
activate this obfuscated code. Following this, on 8th June 1992, Geoff would
publish a message on the CIX conferencing system, this time regarding the Windows 3.1 exectuable
itself, Win.com. It details how the code checks for readings on various input devices,
and that if they all return values that agree with a standard MS-DOS install, then no
error is activated. However, some non Microsoft versions of DOS (including DR) would return
different values, thereby activating the error. Geoff writes how the code is littered with
red herrings - long and convoluted operations whose results are discarded, and how there is
XOR encryption in place, seemingly designed entirely to obscure this part of code. The
only non encrypted part being the word AARD. AARD being the signature Microsoft developer
Aaron Reynolds used to sign off his code. Geoff also notes that the Win.com he was
inspecting would execute but not actually act upon the code, and that's because, the code
in the actual retail version of Windows 3.1 was deactivated. Of course, the damage had already
been done in the beta, and so Microsoft tried to cover their tracks and forget about the whole
thing. But, significantly, if Microsoft felt threated, it could be reactivated any time,
by any update they wished to distribute. Writing in the Dr. Dobbs Journal, Andrew
Schulman would expand on this investigation and Geoff's work and define a crucial part of
the AARD test which first checks whether a network redirector is running, if so, then
it checks the DOS default upper case map is located in the DOS data segment. If it's not
running, it checks that the pointer to the first simulated file control block has a 0 offset. The
crucial part here is that all versions of MS-DOS pass this test, every time, whereas no version of
DR-DOS does, simply due to the way its written. This code was built into other executables,
such as the Windows setup program, the disk caching utility Smartdrv.exe and even
MSD.EXE, Microsoft diagnostics, all packaged with Windows beta build 61 and the pre-release
build 3.10.068, rolled out in January 1992. All the errors are pretty similar and
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the battle, but maybe not quite the war. In 1995, several former employees of Novell
setup Caldera inc. The objective of this company was to create network utilities
with a focus on the Linux operating system. But seeking a DOS operating system to bundle with
their OpenLinux distribution they would acquire Novell DOS and the Digital Research on 23rd July
1996. This deal consisted of a direct payment of $400,000 as well as percentage of DR-DOS
royalties. But, on the same day of acquisition, having acquired the rights, Caldera would
launch an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. This was not just in relation to their AARD code,
but also that Microsoft had combined MS-DOS 7.0 with Windows 95 to prevent
DR-DOS substituting for MS-DOS. Caldera argued that "To create this illusion,
Microsoft simply hid MS-DOS 7 behind the screen of blue sky and white clouds displayed during
the now-familiar Windows 95 startup process.", and even went further to demonstrate
that DR-DOS could be substituted for MS-DOS using a tool they
developed called WinGlue. Even though Microsoft claimed that Windows 95
was it's own, stand-alone operating system, Caldera exposed the plethora of calls that
were going on behind the scenes between DOS and 7.0 and what was effectively, Windows 4.0. Really, anyone who used Windows 95 will be aware
of how important DOS still was in the process, and how much Windows 95 actually got in the way of
running anything particularly resource intensive. Of course Microsoft would dispute all of this,
but it was perhaps Microsoft's own internal communication that was most damming. In fact, as far back as 1992, Microsoft were
talking about completely eliminating the rival DOS problem. In June 1992, Brad Silverberg had
distributed the "Chicago Strategy Document"; "Novell is after the desktop . . . . This is
perhaps our biggest threat. We must respond in a strong way by making Chicago a complete
Windows operating system, from boot-up to shut-down. There will be no place or need
on a Chicago machine for DR DOS (or any DOS)." It was those same internal communications which
bolstered Caldera's claims around the AARD code, and their claims of Microsoft's
illegal tying, monopolisation, exclusive dealing and tortious interference. The original case had been built on Geoff's and
Andrew's analysis of the camouflaged code, but it was these emails, exposed through a court request
which really put the nails in Microsoft's coffin. The case rattled on until the 7th January
2000, with a trial penned in for the 1st of February. However, with Microsoft also
involved in other antitrust legal cases (namely Netscape), they decided to settle
with Caldera costing some $280million dollars. Bryan Sparks, CEO of Caldera commented; "We
are pleased with the result of this lawsuit. We now look forward to vigorous
competition in the marketplace with our Linux products and strategies both
from Caldera Systems Inc. and Lineo Inc.". Shortly after Caldera would spin out into various
other companies, but would ultimately fizzle out. The DR-DOS assets fell to the Canopy
group, and were aquired by DeviceLogics, who shortly after incorporated as DRDOS inc. But, like so many cases involving
Microsoft, the giant would rattle on, and the subsequent companies
around it would disappear. It's a sad end really. But
hey, many of us are still here, using Windows 10, and that's
just the way the cookie crumbles. As or me, I'm about to install
DR-DOS on some old computers. Thanks for watching. Have a great evening.
