Seems a bit obsessed with open source when abandonware like Borland C++ 3.1 and Pascal 7.0 are amazing.

Also, missing the very important, closer to primary sources, physical dead tree resources that are needed as reference to program things.

- Black Book of Graphics Programming (Special Edition) (now FOSS)

- Programmer's Guide To The EGA, VGA, And Super VGA Cards (3rd Edition)

- PC-Intern (where I learned how Central Point, Norton, and later FreeBSD made "GUI" with sub-character graphical pointers in text mode through custom fonts)

- Undocumented PC

- Undocumented DOS

- PC Interrupts (and) Uninterrupted Interrupts (Ralf Brown)

- Microsoft MS-DOS Programmer's Reference

- The Programmer's PC Sourcebook: Reference Tables for IBM PCs and Compatibles, PS/2 Systems, EISA-based Systems, MS-DOS Operating System Through Version 5

- (various hardware books by MindShare)

- Also useful would be real BIOS dumps and (dis)assembly, and MS-DOS source

- Emulators are no substitute for the real thing because the problem is that no emulator (commercial or otherwise) is faithful to the quirks, capabilities, and limitations of real hardware (in system, protected mode debuggers/profilers sure are nice though compared to triggering lockup, spontaneous reboot, or a beeping deadlock). If anyone remembers Bochs, its floppy behavior definitely doesn't act or look anything like a real FDC. (I submitted some patches for it many moons ago in college.)

(Yep, I own a "braindead" 286, 386DX, 486DX-100, Am5, and P5, P2, P Pro, and P4.)

Because if something can't work on real hardware and original OSes, then it's probably make believe. Prefer to make honest, real things wherever feasible.

Kudos for Borland compilers, I only got into Microsoft compilers with Visual C++ 5.0 onwards.

Even for Windows, Microsoft never produced anything C++ that was as good as OWL, VCL, Firemonkey.

Or since the theme is DOS, Turbo Vision.

PCIntern was such a fun and interesting book; I lived in that, back in the day, and I still have my copy somewhere.