MS-DOS Is 30 Years Old Today 433
An anonymous reader writes "Thirty years ago, on July 27 1981, Microsoft bought the rights for QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for $25,000. QDOS, otherwise known as 86-DOS, was designed by SCP to run on the Intel 8086 processor, and was originally thrown together in just two months for a 0.1 release in 1980 (thus the name). Meanwhile, IBM had planned on powering its first Personal Computer with CP/M-86, which had been the standard OS for Intel 8086 and 8080 architectures at the time, but a deal could not be struck with CP/M's developer, Digital Research. IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few of years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools — and as you can probably tell from the landscape of the computer world today, the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed."
"the partnership worked out rather well" (Score:4, Insightful)
For Microsoft.
wow (Score:5, Insightful)
what a half assed summary, and it was not the IBM/Microsoft partnership that did shit, its the MS licencing agreement that allowed MS to sell to other people than IBM that made a huge fucking difference when the clones came in and obliterated IBM at their own game
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Wax nostalgic (Score:1, Insightful)
DOS! Int 21! Oh how I miss those days!
Graphics! Bypass the fucker and hit the graphics card directly.
And the extenders.....
Those were the days. Needed to figure out code? All you needed were some Highlighters, pencil paper and a few hours and you were done.
Now you spend hours and days to figure out that the class you were hunting down was nothing more than a constant - why the programmer couldn't use a fucking "typedef" instead - Oh I know! It wasn't "Object Oriented" and his professor at school told him that it was "incorrect" because it violated the natural physical laws of computer science that he pulled out of his ass.
CS Professors who teach their preferences as "law" or "scientific fact" should be executed by being forced to write an operating system Apple Basic on a Windows 7 hand held device.
Remember kids, what your CS professor taught you as the "right" way was nothing more than his or hers preferences and he forced them on you because he could.
True story: In a CS class, there was an MSEE in there because the dumb fucking administration forced him and me to take the C++ class because it was "required" as a prereq for a grad class - it didn't matter that this guy (and me) learned on his own and was an embedded programmer with years of C++ experience.
Anyway, the CS Prof. told the class the "right" way to do something - doesn't matter what it was. The MSEE pointed out why that isn't necessarily correct. Prof argued that it was. Long story short: MSEE spanked CS prof hard - metaphorically of course - about why and how the prof was wrong.
CS Prof: "This is my class and we'll do it this way because it's the way I wanted it."
Those that can do; those that can't teach.
Worked out well? (Score:3, Insightful)
and as you can probably tell from the landscape of the computer world today, the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed.
Worked out well for who? Microsoft? Okay, true. IBM? Nope. You and I? Nope. Other than a few pockets at MS, who did it work out well for?
Re:Still in use (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm an Amiga bigot from waaaay back, too. (My first computer as an adult was an Amiga 1000, or just an Amiga when it was originally sold.).
But as a former frontline flamewarrior, I have to say: It's time to come out of the jungle. We lost that war. Yes, our chosen computer was vastly superior in every way. The difference was that Commodore couldn't sell T-bone steak and potato chips to starving people. Commmodore-brand sushi would be marketed under the tagline "The best cold, dead raw fish you've ever had!".
Superior marketing always wins. That's the lesson here, Amiga Persecution Complex notwithstanding.
Worked out well? (Score:5, Insightful)
Worked out well? In what sense did it work out well? Economically for Microsoft and IBM? Perhaps. For the rest of the world that suffers working under the decrepit POS that is Windows OS? Not so much. IMNSHO, DOS was a terrific mistake and its adoption 30 years ago has directly hindered the development of the computer industry.
Re:Worked out well? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I remember when I was a kid, the computer world was very fragmented. Apple was incompatible with Atari was incompatible with Commodore was incompatible with IBM. Need I mention the other minor players, such as Franklin, Acorn, TI, Sinclair, etc.? Great game came out? Odds are it won't run on the system that YOU have. As much as I generally dislike the major players, at least there are only three major platforms that you have to develop for. In fact, you can develop a game for only one market, and still have the opportunity to make quite a bit of money.
IBM/Microsoft set back IT 20 years at least. (Score:4, Insightful)
By introducing such a lame technology like the IBM PC and MS DOS, IBM/Microsoft set back the IT industry 20 years or more.
We could have 32 bit machines with GUI, preemptive multitasking and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics much earlier.
Re:Win for almost everyone... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah all this cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing is terrible for users. We really lost.
Go ahead and predict the past future if things were the way you wanted them if you must, but that's a bankrupt exercise in wish fulfillment.
Re:Cue a gazillion posts... (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary is technically incorrect. Near the end it states that Microsoft had years under its belt with MS-DOS and Basic. The mistake in the summary is that they had years of experience with MS-DOS--that didn't even exist as a product at the time.
It had years under its belt with Basic which was written initially by stealing Harvard computing power (Paul Allen wasn't a student and Gates was just a deadbeat about his classes, none of which at the time were computer related). And the language itself was a rip off of the language invented by two other professors from a different school.
Years earlier, as kids, Gates and Allen both had been in trouble with the law for hacking and stealing time-share minutes. Back then those were significant costs to anyone using them. Instead of being prosecuted they were hired to test for faults and weaknesses in security.
It was Allen who knew of the SCP QDOS. Gates essentially lied to IBM knowing that he could gain control of QDOS. In Microsoft taking over QDOS, SCP retained rights to any and all changes made by Microsoft, and were owed royalties. Microsoft failed to pay those and SCP owner who was going bankrupt sued Microsoft and won. He paid his debts and had a little left for retirement. MS-DOS wasn't created till after IBM-DOS had been out for some time.
So, they stole computing time from private companies and were forgiven for being so brilliant. Then later they were to steal computing time again, knowing it was illegal, from Harvard, to write an emulator for the 8086 instruction set so they could write their version of Basic which was stolen from two professors from another major university. They then used that to make a company (pirates benefiting commercially from their theft), and in the process Gates tried to screw Allen by, during his convalescence where he nearly died, by getting Ballmer to connive to gain control of his stock. And, during the negotiation process of deciding how to split the shares upon creation of the new business, Gates decried Allen because he'd become an employee of MITS and thus apparently deserved fewer shares, when after then agreement about the split, a few weeks (months) later, Gates was also an employee of MITS. Then, Gates and Allen had the gall to write open letters to others about stealing software. The reality is, that Gates and Allen had stolen considerable sums by then.
Re:Cue a gazillion posts... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hi,
/P to page it).
Speaking as an "old fart", I can say that, while this is funny, you obviously aren't an old-school DOS user.
If you were typing that from a DOS prompt on an old PC, you'd enter it as:
\offlawn
Few people had more than one hard drive back then, so your default drive would be C:, eliminating the need to specify the drive letter. Then, you'd leverage DOS' internal processing of commands: It would look for internal commands first, then look for external commands. When extensions weren't specified, it would look for executables as follows: COM first, then EXE and then BAT.
Since OFFLAWN.COM apparently exists in your example, you'd save typing another four characters just by knowing this.
Now, with regards to the location of OFFLAWN.COM? Nobody I knew would ever fill up the root of C: with files - there was a limit to the number of files and directories that could exist in the root, after all, and if you reached it, you'd get an out of space error once you tried to create another.
In addition, given the fact that a standard DOS screen was 80 by 25, you'd want to limit a DIR display, so as to avoid having to pipe the output (later, use
The approach that I used was this: The root of C: was limited to COMMAND.COM, AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, the hidden system files, and subdirectories (what you young folk call "folders" these days) in which you'd store programs and data.
Since there were also limitations on the length of the path, I'd make the names of subdirectories that I wanted included in it short, too.
My usual approach ended up in a path similar to this:
C:\BAT;C:\BIN;C:\DOS;
BAT contained my batch files. BIN contained DOS utilities that enhanced or replaced similar DOS commands and DOS contained DOS, of course.
Doing this kept the path small, reduced the time to search it, and also ensured that DOS would search for executables the way that *I* wanted it to.
I wrote BAT files to start all of my programs, you see, and so putting them all in C:\BAT would ensure that they would be found and run first. Most were simple: Change to the directory where the program was installed, run it, and then return to the root of C: once it exited.
Since this path leveraged the way DOS processed commands running WordStar from a command line was as easy as typing ws from anywhere and pressing enter, without having to actually have the directory where WS.COM resided in the path, nor having to be in a specific subdirectory in order to avoid the dreaded "Bad command or filename".
Finally, given the organization I just explained, OFFLAWN.COM would be in C:\BIN, and so, all you'd need to do to run it would be type: offlawn (DOS converted all input to uppercase, after all, so why waste time pressing the Shift key?).
And so I close by saying this:
offlawn
*grin*
Regards,
dj