MS-DOS vs. CP/M (was Re: Stupid CP/M question)

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Mon Jan 11 20:21:27 1999

Allison wrote:
> Specifically it was seattle computer that needed a 16bit os
> for their S100 8088 box. They literally took CPM1.4 disassembled
> it and lofted it to run on 8088 and called the result Q-dos.

No, they didn't, as anyone who's looked at disassemblies of both CP/M and
86-DOS (aka QDOS) will tell you. If they had done that it would have been
more compatible with CP/M.

Tim Patterson (sp?) wrote it from scratch to be similar to CP/M, but he
deliberately did some things differently. In a few ways it is actually a
fair bit better than CP/M, e.g., the fact that it actually stores a byte
length for a file, and that it doesn't need multiple directory entries
for large files. But in most regards it is just more of the same, which
is all that Tim intended. Remember what the Q and D in QDOS stand for.
Hint: the D does not stand for disk.
Received on Mon Jan 11 1999 - 20:21:27 GMT