From: rhealey@dellr4.digibd.com (Rob Healey) Subject: Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: Alpha release Linux/GNU/X unix clone on CDROM for PCs Date: 1 Dec 1992 21:15:00 GMT
In article <1992Nov30.041609.14502@leland.Stanford.EDU>, dkeisen@leland.Stanford.EDU (Dave Eisen) writes:
|> For all we know, Bill Gates may have greatly advanced the personal
|> computer industry. You can't compare DOS to what we would have
|> written because we are totally irrelevant. You can only compare
|> it to the kind of OS IBM would have gotten if they had gone to
|> someone else with similarly powerful marketing abilities. That's
|> the only kind of vendor who could land an account like IBM. And
|> maybe the OS this hypothetical company would write would have been
|> even worse than DOS.
|>
No, Bill threw it back in to the stone ages. QDOS, from which
MSDOS was derived, was a quicky attempt at an 8086 port of
CP/M. CP/M-86 was available but Digital Research was out playing
golf when IBM came to call. Bill said, "ya, sure, I got this
little thing over here you can use" and thus history was
doomed to Intel based MSDOS systems forever more.
At the time, CP/M-86 was a much better OS. If IBM had gone
m68k, Motorola didn't want ALL their 68k's to be monopolized
by IBM so Intel got the deal, CP/M-68k would have run on it too.
If Digital Research, and Motorola, had had their shit together
we'd all be in ALOT better shape right now OS wise and system
architecture wise.
CP/M-86 or CP/M-68k would have been the other OS and at that point
in time CP/M was alot better OS that MSDOS would be for years. It
also had decent compiler and application support as opposed to
MSDOS. Remember, all early MSDOS products were quicky ports of
8080 or Z80 based CP/M programs since MSDOS used similar
BIOS calls. Going with CP/M-86 would have made life alot easier and
we would have had multi-user systems immediately, multi-user
Z80 CP/M, MP/M, was already available.
sigh,
-Rob