Lawrence Walker wrote:
> simply jumped on a bandwagon that was already there. The DR <> MS relationship
> is also another interesting link. TMK DR's successor Caldera still owns the
> MSDOS source-code. Not sure of the ins and outs of this.
That turns out not to be the case. Caldera got the rights to DRDOS
from Novell, who got it from DR. DRDOS was a direct descendant of
CP/M with MSDOS functionality added -- no common source. MSDOS
started as a CP/M clone by Seattle Computing (QDOS) who licensed it
to Microsoft (so the story goes) when they got tired of explaining
"Quick & Dirty Operating System" to clients. Caldera doesn't own
any source code Microsoft ever was convicted of using -- "look and
feel" is a different can of worms.
Those elements from 2.0 on that make MSDOS really different from
(not necessarily superior to) come from the Xenix porting effort.
While MS was never able to make it a product (they let Altos, Tandy,
IBM and SCO do that -- in that order), it gave them the concepts of
subdirectories, "device independance" and pipes (though MSDOS pipes
were really "command1 >tmpfile;command2 <tmpfile;rm tmpfile" -- the
very thing that the guys at Murray Hill developed pipes to avoid).
--
Ward Griffiths <mailto:gram_at_cnct.com> <http://www.cnct.com/home/gram/>
When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked me if I had any
firearms with me. I said "Well, what do you need?" -- Steven Wright
Received on Sat Sep 19 1998 - 02:50:33 BST