Mac vs PC

[Bob Richards]

--- Erik Newsholme <bladesmith at mindspring.com> wrote:
---------------------------------
 
IBM went to another software company (can't remember
who it was) in Seattle and they were just too busy to
talk to the suits from IBM.
---------------------------------

I believe that was Digital Research. The 8-bit OS of
the time was CPM, ran on many 8080 and Z80 systems of
the time, and applications like dBase and Wordstar ran
under it. IIRC, CPM-86 was slated to be released with
the IBM PC, but was late. Gates had managed, as part
of his contract with IBM, to require that a copy of
MSDOS be included with every PC shipped (sound
familiar!) CPM-86 cost something like $250 a copy,
MSDOS was something like $50. (1982 dollars) As a
result, MSDOS reached "critical mass" first and CPM
became history.

Later, Digital Research took on Microsoft again when
they came out with DRDos. Microsoft had let MSDos
stagnate at version 3.x. DR came out with DRDos that
allowed larger partitions and added lots of
functionality missing in MSDos. All of a sudden,
Microsoft started updating MSDos. DRDos was eventually
sold to Novell? I think. I actually ran Windows 3.x on
top of DRDos for a while.

Source for the above: My memory, which ain't what it
used to be!

Here is a good link on the above discussion:

http://www.joewein.de/dri.html

Bob R.

=================================================
To access the email archives for this list, go to
http://lists.f3a.us/pipermail/nsrca-discussion/
To be removed from this list, go to http://www.nsrca.org/discussionA.htm
and follow the instructions.

List members email returned for mailbox full will be removed from the list.