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."
Re:Still in use (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0 (Score:4, Interesting)
And just remember how WordPerfect 5.1 met all your word processing needs in less than 640k, while OpenOffice writer needs 640M to do it.
Re:DOS is crap, but DosBox is awesome. (Score:2, Interesting)
OS/2 was the first real OS I used. Later I "upgraded" to windows, as forced by my employer. What a major step backwards, especially in usability and reliability.
I still remember when our OS/2 server was forcefully migrated to NT. Some bonehead left the CDROM drive open and had shared the drive. Later, when someone attempted to access the shared CDROM drive, the entire server hung waiting for someone physically in front of the computer to acknowledge the drive was inaccessible. Once someone clicked OKAY, the file server magically started serving files again.
There is literally nothing positive I can associate with Microsoft. The managed to damage an entire industry by making it acceptable to release known buggy and broken software.
Literally, anyone who considers MS to be a good technology company is an idiot. MS first and foremost has ALWAYS been one of the world's leading marketing companies. From a technology perspective, I doubt they'd rank in the top 100. Of course, reality and perception are two entirely different things.
Most people thing MS is a tech giant. They are not. They are a marketing giant specializing in the tech industry. Most people think Bill Gates is a business genius. He's not. He's a criminal thug who leveraged his subpar technology via marketing brilliance, sheer luck, and IBM's massive ego and ineptitude, to setback an entire industry almost two decades worth of advancements. That's not to say Gates is dumb. Its just that his prowess is constantly misunderstood by the general public.