The story of the MSX platform, as it celebrates its 40th anniversary, is one of the games industries remarkable journeys that has left a powerful imprint on the world of technology and entertainment. Born in June 1983, the MSX, an acronym for "Machines with Software eXchangeability", emerged as a pioneering force that not only connected continents but also people through the magic of computing.

The birth of the MSX was a momentous event, an ambitious undertaking that materialized through the visionary partnership of Microsoft and ASCII Corporation. Their shared vision was clear: to create a standardized computing platform that would foster compatibility and ease of software development across a myriad of hardware manufacturers. What began as an idea soon evolved into a global phenomenon, revolutionizing the way people interacted with computers and forever altering the course of gaming history.

Microsoft seems to be on the verge of introducing a new file recovery tool in a future Windows 10 update. The news, courtesy of The verge, paints a MS-DOS-based tool that would allow users to recover most of the "basic" files they'd be looking for after accidental deletion: MP3 files, MP4 videos, PDFs, JPEG images, and Office, Word as well as PowerPoint documents. The File Recovery Tool is already available as a download from Microsoft's app store (and requires Windows 10 version 19041.0 or higher).

The lack of a GUI could be a put-off for some users; but again, this is a free tool from the company. As a refresher, a file isn't fully deleted if you only use Windows' "delete" function - even if you delete it from the Recycle Bin afterwards. All that does is tell the OS that that those particular storage addresses are available for being written to again - the bits that the file is made of are still there. This is the reason why successful file recovery depends mostly on whether or not new information has been written to those particular cells again. If it has, chances to recover your data are slim.

Considering Microsoft only recently acquired GitHub, it took them no time at all to put the software development platform to good use. Accordingly, the Redmond-based IT giant has set up an online repository from which they could re-release versions 1.25 and 2.0 of MS-DOS. According to Rich Turner, a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, it is "much easier to find, read, and refer to MS-DOS source files if they're in a GitHub repo than in the original downloadable compressed archive file." The compressed archive Turner mentions is the original release of the source code from 2014 when both versions of MS-DOS were first made available via the Computer History Museum after their discovery by Tim Paterson. This is fitting considering Paterson is the original author of 86-DOS, which forms the basis for MS-DOS.

Microsoft has stated that they will ignore any pull requests or changes to the original source code, with the repository instead being kept static more as a historical reference to be used in literature. That said, users are more than welcome to create separate development forks for exploration and experimentation. When it comes to yours truly, while I don't plan to do much experimenting, this has created an itch to relive the past. Maybe I should dust off that old MS-DOS system in the garage and see if it still works.