Computer Market Phases (Was: Our fine educational system (was : Login on VMS))

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Wed Sep 27 12:08:36 2000

> > Phase III - Characterized by the start of LSI. Hardware costs were
> > still high and operating systems were mostly bundled. Volume was
> > still low in most cases - up to about 1985 - IBM was still the major
> > player, but no longer so dominant
>
> MSDOS wasn't available separate from the hardware until much later.
> I remember running a copied version of DOS on a brand new '286 clone
> I built from parts purchased from Jameco. I searched high and low,
> and couldn't find MSDOS unbundled anywhere. This was about a year or
> so after the '286 was released (early '90s? I don't remember)

Also not quite right... alhtough it certainly wasn't a shrink-wrapped
product, you could purchase MS-DOS without hardware by buying the
Binary Adaptation Kit. These were available from at least MS-DOS 1.25,
and maybe for MS-DOS 1.1 as well.

Pretty cool, you got .OBJ files (or were they still .REL files?) for
most of DOS, and source for drivers and utilities (ANSI.SYS and PRINT.COM
come to mind).

regards,
-doug q
Received on Wed Sep 27 2000 - 12:08:36 BST