Article Reference: Linux -- The New CP/M

From: Nico de Jong <nico_at_farumdata.dk>
Date: Wed Aug 20 04:15:00 2003

> On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Martin Scott Goldberg wrote:
>
> > The bottom line of all the above being in the 70's and early 80's, many
> > many platforms = bad. CP/M must be customized to support many
> > many platforms/disk formats/HW configurations = bad, and it's licensing
> > practices leads to many different flavors. Microsoft used IBM (by also
> > pushing for an open platform and a non-OS based BIOS that they would
> > not have to worry about protecting - that's IBM's problem) to push for
> > standardization and thin the herd. And set itself in position to retain
>
> Acutally, Microsoft hedged its bets and created versions of MS-DOS for all
> sorts of platforms, since it was by no means certain that the IBM PC would
> dominate until at least a couple years after it showed up.
>

When I started in the micro world in 1984, my first system was a Japanese Sord system, called S-343. It was a dual-floppy system, running MS-DOS 3.21. This was a specially adapted version, where the 360k floppies were accessible by other MS systems, but the 1.2M floppies were not. I dont know why, though.

Nico
Received on Wed Aug 20 2003 - 04:15:00 BST