TRS80 Model 1 question

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Mon Mar 18 12:12:49 2002

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.
Received on Mon Mar 18 2002 - 12:12:49 GMT