>On Sun, 17 Mar 2002, Richard A. Cini, Jr. wrote:
>> me which disk operating system shipped with the drive option? My system is a
>
>TRS-DOS by Randy Cook
>The first version that I remember being able to use was 2.0
>2.1 was significantly more complete, but buggy. Randy Cook never finished
>it; Radio Shack wouldn't pay him royalties.
>
>APR-DOS (Later "New-DOS") from Apparat was based on TRS-DOS 2.1 with most
>of the bugs fixed and a few enhancements.
>Initially Apparat told people to buy TRS-DOS plus theirs to avoid
>copyright infringement. Documentation consisted of a list of bug fixes to
>2.1
>Then they apparently tried to claim that it was completely
>re-written, and therefore not infringing, until Randy Cook's lawyer showed
>them Randy Cook's hidden copyright message was still present in theirs.
>
>TRS-DOS 2.2 and 2.3 were cleaner than 2.1, but not as fancy as New-DOS.
>But the "Randy Cook" hidden copyright message was changed to "Tandy Corp"
>
>Then Apparat produced their non-infringing NewDos-80
>
>Then Randy Cook came out VTOS 3.0, but never finished it.
>"Documentation" was mostly just a feature list. The publisher wouldn't
>pay him royalties.
>
>Then Randy Cook came out VTOS 4.0, but never finished it.
>"Documentation" was mostly just a feature list. The publisher (Adventure
>International/Scott Adams) wouldn't pay him royalties.
>
>Lobo Drives created a new expansion interface using a 179x chip for double
>density; TRS-DOS would not work with it. They purchased rights to VTOS,
>hired everybody they could get their hands on (such as Roy Soltoff aka
>Misosys), and came out with LDOS.
>
>Radio Shack came out with the model 3, and Model 3 TRS-DOS 1.1, 1.2, 1.3
>
>Radio Shack came out with their own version of the Percom Doubler (179x
>for model 1). And licensed LDOS, renaming it TRS-DOS 6. Randy Cook
>finally got royalties from Radio Shack.
A nice twisting chain of events. Not included in the above
chain are also:
- DOSPlus (Micro-System Software)
- DoubleDOS (Percom)
- MultiDOS (Cosmopolitan)
- UltraDOS (Level IV Products)
I've always used the various Tandy and Logical Systems DOSes
myself, so have never tried any of the above four myself. Ira
Goldklang does provide disk images of various Model I DOSes on his
emulator page though, including most of the ones listed above.
Jeff
--
Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.cchaven.com
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757
Received on Mon Mar 18 2002 - 11:43:24 GMT