The coolest thing about this story is that the entire endeavor was apparently prompted by a random developer tweet! If you’ve ever wondered what all goes in to opening the source of historic software products like this one:

This code was restored from the Microsoft corporate archives and cleared for release.

• Developer names and aliases were removed, with the exception of current employees who worked on the original release who consented to keeping their names in place
• The archive consisted of several CDs, some of which were for alternate builds or products, and have been excluded
• The code does not build with today’s engineering tools, and is released as-is.