Stupid CP/M question

From: Miles O'Neal <meo_at_netads.com>
Date: Sat Jan 9 02:09:07 1999

D. Peschel said...
|
|> No, Dos works the same way as CP/M, unfortunately.
|
|Apparently I was unclear.

No, you were clear. You missed my point. CP/M came first,
then DOS. Therefore DOS worked liked CP/M, not the other
way around. Your technical explanation was fine, I was
just nitpicking. I refuse to give Micro$oft or Bill Gates
one damned iota of glory after all they stole from others.

|Yes, it should have. And the more MS waited to improve DOS (because there
|was no incentive since they already had a monopoly, or because they were
|sloppy programmers, or for backward-compatibility reasons) the more
|excruciating the thought of improvements which would break old programs

DEC pulled it off with VMS. The people who had to
have the old compatibility just kept running the
old hardware and software, and everyone else moved
forwards.

And right happy about it most of us were. We ended
up with an awesome development system that did OK for
realtime (VAX/VMS) and an awesome realtime system
that still needed better developer tools (PDP/whatever)

8^)

|became. If they had just ripped off a better OS, that might have been nice
|as well. Something with long file names, or multitasking, or whatever.
|And OSs of the time DID have long file names. I don't know about
|multitasking (maybe OS/9 or FLEX were around when DOS was born?).

VMS was at least in the works, and UNIX was around in
some forms. There was precedent. But the guy hacking
DOS was just messing around, trying to do a slightly
better CP/M (as was Digital Research, who GAVE AWAY the
whole stinking computer world to Bill Gates on a silver
platter, with a military escort, and a ticker tape parade.

For crying out loud, the first versions of UNIX ran on
minis that didn't have any more memory space than micros.
(OK, so they had 16 bit processors, I know. So did the
PC! Sort of...)

Not that I'm bitter, you understand. 8^)

-Miles
Received on Sat Jan 09 1999 - 02:09:07 GMT