From: peter@ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Subject: Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: Alpha release Linux/GNU/X unix clone on CDROM for PCs Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1992 23:53:53 GMT
In article <1992Nov29.180008.3128@news.nd.edu> dmatiske@virgil.helios.nd.edu (david matiskella) writes:
> I think you are a little harsh on Bill Gates. The guy was a great
> programmer. HOw many people do you know who have written a basic in 3k?
Well, I wrote a better language than Basic that ran on top of Forth in about
2K. With the base Forth (including interactive mode) that probably came to
about 6K, but I could have gotten down to 3K by leaving out the interactive
mode and all the Forth I/O routines. The Forth was commercial, but I could
have done that base subset myself... I certainly hacked enough Forth kernels:
even did a multitasker that was mostly portable (needed about 16 lines of
assembly for each processor) between the PDP-11, HP-1000, and 8080.
I can beat my hairless hacker breast with the best of them. PLUS I know how
to keep my lines down to 80 characters!
> In addition look at the computers available when MSDOS was written.
Yep, I was there. When MS-DOS came out I and most of my friends were amazed
at how bad it was. CP/M was better, and CP/M was none too good.
> Another thing to consider is that MSDOS was written very quickly.
Bill didn't write MSDOS. It was hacked together by another vendor and MS
basically fixed some bugs and shipped it.
> I keep hearing how great Herd is going to be but when was the idea first
> proposed?
I was running Unix on a PC/XT in 1984, and it was faster than MS-DOS.
Minix has been out for at least 6 years.
CP/M was better in 1978 than MS-DOS in 1982.
Cromemco had a UNIX-lookalike running on multiple Z-80s in 1980.
AmigaOS first shipped in 1985, and it was already better than any PC operating
system that was to ship until OS/2 2.0 seven years later.
MS-DOS, by any technical standard, is a disaster we're only now beginning to
recover from. There were dozens of better systems. Hell, the Atari 800 O/S
was better than CP/M and MS-DOS together and that ran on a game machine.
--
%Peter da Silva/77487-5012 USA/+1 713 274 5180/Have you hugged your wolf today?
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