apparat
ven reddy
guys? too bad they didn't port NEWDOS/80 to 8088's......might be a different
world.
Bill Vermillion
<v...@xtracool.com> wrote:
Well I understand at one time Zenith was looking at LDOS for their
systems. That too might have been a different world - as the PC
thing hadn't caught on yet.
--
Bill Vermillion bv @ wjv.com
Claudio Puviani
> >those guys? too bad they didn't port NEWDOS/80 to 8088's......might
> >be a different world.
>
> Well I understand at one time Zenith was looking at LDOS for their
> systems. That too might have been a different world - as the PC
> thing hadn't caught on yet.
Unfortunately, a port of NEWDOS or LDOS (or any other variant) wouldn't have
fared well against MS-DOS. What made MS-DOS 1.0 attractive was that it was
extremely easy to mechanically translate CP/M-80 code for it (even better
than CP/M-86, strangely enough). It made it possible to quickly port such
programs as Wordstar and dBase II. From that point on, the stage is pretty
much set.
Claudio
Bill Vermillion
Considering these was prior to the MS-DOS world and the PC - whose
to say that if for example Zenith had picked LDOS and had any
success that IBM might have gone to them for the OS. I was running
the precursor to LDOS - VTOS long before the PC saw the light of
day.
I hope you appreciated the trouble I just went to getting this book
out from behind a printer. Sales invoice 2/5/81 on the VTOS 4.0
manual from QSD. I'm even on the dedication page.
Is my memory failing - or was it just a short time after that
that the battle started with Lobo . My first issue of the LDOS
quarterly has a July 1, 1981 date on it - still prior to the PC
introduction. Things happened really fast then.
Somewhere I still have the 12 mimeographed manual for TRSDOS - and
the handwritten labeled disks. That version discussed device
independance, and other things that were missing when the released
version came out a month or so later. Thinking about this now I
was awfully early on some of this
My Level II Basic manual is a photocopy of the galley proofs.
Nothing like bleeding edge.
Bill
Claudio Puviani
> to say that if for example Zenith had picked LDOS and had any
> success that IBM might have gone to them for the OS. I was running
> the precursor to LDOS - VTOS long before the PC saw the light of
> day.
CP/M-80 was also prior to the MS-DOS world and it was considered by all
camps to be the de facto standard O/S for the 8-bit world. Just about every
8-bit system offered CP/M as an option, including 6502-based systems like
Apple and C64s (using a Z80 add-on board). Couple that with the fact that
the body of software for CP/M dwarfed that for any other platform. In fact,
it was so ubiquitous that it came as a major shock to everyone when Digital
Research dropped the ball and didn't capture the PC market. What did capture
the PC market was nothing other than a CP/M clone!
LDOS (and all other TRS-DOS variants) wouldn't have stood a snowball's
chance in hell against this, even if a company like Zenith had been foolish
enough to port it to their new hardware. Maybe if Logical Systems had been
immensely wiser and had ported LDOS to other Z80 systems years before, there
would have been a gleam of possibility... maybe. But under the circumstances
(read: reality), the thought doesn't even make for a credible science
fiction short story. Might as well speculate over what kind of hardware we
would have today if the 1802 had been chosen by Apple and Tandy instead of
the 6502 and Z80.
But just to humor the curious, how would things have evolved under LDOS?
Well, most of the features in MS-DOS ended up being borrowed from UNIX the
moment hard disks became popular. This includes directory hierarchies, I/O
redirection, and core APIs. There is no reason to believe that the same
wouldn't have happened with LDOS. The forces that pushed operating systems
to converge toward UNIX wouldn't have disappeared. What about Microsoft?
They already owned the compiler market and were starting to make headways
into the applications markets. Even if LDOS owned the O/S market, Microsoft
could still have developped a Windows-like GUI and eventually pulled people
into a new generation Windows/OS hybrid. One might argue that GEM would have
had a better chance, but what drew people to Windows was that it was simply
a better platform for which to write software. So while the details and some
of the players would be different today, the overall picture would have had
to remain very similar because technological and market forces wouldn't have
been swayed by choosing LDOS over MS-DOS. And while I respect the folks at
Logical Systems, no one could argue that they had the resources or
capabilities of taking advantage of the situation like Microsoft has.
Bill Vermillion
Claudio Puviani <Puv...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>But just to humor the curious, how would things have evolved under
>LDOS? Well, most of the features in MS-DOS ended up being borrowed
>from UNIX the moment hard disks became popular. This includes
>directory hierarchies, I/O redirection, and core APIs. There is no
>reason to believe that the same wouldn't have happened with LDOS.
A lot in LDOS (and spec;ed in the the original TRSDOS but never
made it) seem insipred by Unix - long before MS dos saw light of
day.
Such things as permissions for what were essentially owner, group
and others, with separate passwords for each were in LDOS. Part of
that went away when the change was made from the 3-bit field for
year. (Three bits had been considered enough as no OS had lasted 7
years before).
Re-direction? Sure was in LDOS - and in the orignal TRSDOS doc -
the 12 page mimegraphed one before the first printed ones.
LDOS had device links too.
LINK *KO to *SO
LINK *SI to *DO
That gave you a 'communications program' of sorts.
Link the KI - keyboard input to the serial output, and link the
serial input to the display output.
The you typed to the modem or what was connected.
Link *PR *DO made everything sent to the printer to to the screen.
The attrib command did far more than MSDOS ever did.
It even had a spool command. Being able to put a filter
in between devices was also quite Unix like.
So you can't say (about MS DOS borrowing Unix commands) that the
same thing wouldn't have happend in LDOS - because it did happen in
LDOS long before the first hierarchical diretory (DOS 2.0) came in
from MS.
Using LDOS (actually VTOS from 3.x thru 4.x thru LDOS 5 and 6) made
Unix seem quite natural to me when I migrated to that in 1983.
It really was quite an amazing OS.
>The forces that pushed operating systems to converge toward UNIX
>wouldn't have disappeared.
Well Gates thought the future was in Unix. And he loudly
proclaimed that - before IBM knocked on his door. "SHOW ME THE
MONEY!"
> Even if LDOS owned the O/S market, Microsoft could still have
>developped a Windows-like GUI and eventually pulled people into a
>new generation Windows/OS hybrid. One might argue that GEM would
>have had a better chance, but what drew people to Windows was that
>it was simply a better platform for which to write software.
Not at first - not in my book at least. I have 1.4 and 2.0 of
Windows. 3.0 was better and 3.1 finally got things to level that
ordinary users could handle.
> So while the details and some of the players would be different
>today, the overall picture would have had to remain very similar
>because technological and market forces wouldn't have been swayed
>by choosing LDOS over MS-DOS.
However - if LDOS had support from Zenith - and if it were more
popular - what is to say the IBM could not have gone to Logical
and had them build an OS for their new computer. Remember that the
PC as we know it was the 3rd attempt by IBM at a small business
machine - and the prior attempt was on a 68000 platform. Since the
PC was conceived and built in under a year - could a different OS
availabilty perhaps caused a change in the base chip the device
was built upon.
I just re-read "The Home Computer Revolution" a couple of years
ago. It was published back before the PC when RS, Apple, Commdore
were building there machines, when Bally was set to introduce
theirs and when Sears was bringing out a machine. The (now)
legendary Ted Nelson was the author - and he's the only one who
ever came close to predicting the amount of computers in use in a
given time frame. Three years later he wrote "Literary Machines"
and gave the world a brand new word 'hypertext'.
Those really were fun times.
>And while I respect the folks at
>Logical Systems, no one could argue that they had the resources or
>capabilities of taking advantage of the situation like Microsoft has.
If IBM had not knocked on their door what would have happened. Go
back an read some of the computer writings that were written during
that time. Bill Gates was quoted as saying "There is no way a
company can sell over $1,000,000 worth of software a year and I have
the figure to prove it". He later said "This is no way a company
can sell over $10,000,000 worth of software a year, and I have the
figures to prove it". (Those quotes are approximate - but I did
run MS Basic 4.2 on my CPM machine. Vector Graphics chassis with a
California Computer Systems CPU (Z80) and floppy controller.
Somewhere I even have a TRS80 Model I to S100 adaptor interface
card. Bought it but never installed it. Had the Model I as a
terminal into the S100 at one time.
ven reddy
as to what the defacto OS or they didn't care because they went to see BillG
first instead of GaryK. I would think they would have gone for CPM and
leveraged the whole SW base, or they figured they needed a new OS to keep
potentital competitors at bay. At that crucial point, they should have gone
to see the Apparat or LDOS guys instead (hell, why not Seattle Computer
Products?)
-ven
"Claudio Puviani" <Puv...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1LSt4.2399$qt1....@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
> But just to humor the curious, how would things have evolved under LDOS?
> Well, most of the features in MS-DOS ended up being borrowed from UNIX the
> moment hard disks became popular. This includes directory hierarchies, I/O
> redirection, and core APIs. There is no reason to believe that the same
> wouldn't have happened with LDOS. The forces that pushed operating systems
> to converge toward UNIX wouldn't have disappeared. What about Microsoft?
> They already owned the compiler market and were starting to make headways
> into the applications markets. Even if LDOS owned the O/S market,
Microsoft
> could still have developped a Windows-like GUI and eventually pulled
people
> into a new generation Windows/OS hybrid. One might argue that GEM would
have
> had a better chance, but what drew people to Windows was that it was
simply
> a better platform for which to write software. So while the details and
some
> of the players would be different today, the overall picture would have
had
> to remain very similar because technological and market forces wouldn't
have
> been swayed by choosing LDOS over MS-DOS. And while I respect the folks at
Claudio Puviani
LDOS.
BV> So you can't say (about MS DOS borrowing Unix commands) that the
BV> same thing wouldn't have happend in LDOS
If you read the two quotes, we're both saying the same thing.
BV> It really was quite an amazing OS.
Well, as a systems developper, I'm slightly less impressed. It was excellent
for its intended use, and better that most other programs of its type, but
as an operating system, it has nothing to brag about. It was technically
superior to TRS-DOS derivatives and to CP/M, but it wasn't even in the same
league as OS/9. But, regardless of where LDOS stood, the sad truth is that
technical merit has very little impact on popularity. If it did, Windows
98/98 or MacOS would never have existed and we would all be running hardware
independent, real-time, fault-tolerant microkernel based systems.
BV> Well Gates thought the future was in Unix.
Yes, and he was wrong how? Just look through the jobs postings for software
engineers, system administrators, or database administrators and easily 1/2
of them are for UNIX.
BV> Remember that the PC as we know it was the 3rd attempt by
BV> IBM at a small business machine - and the prior attempt was on a
BV> 68000 platform.
Not that this has any bearing on our discussion of LDOS, but IBM's 68000
based systems were actually intended for laboratories and other research
institutions. There was no plan, and certainly no software, to make these
machines into business systems. I do remember drooling over them, though. As
another side note, at around the time that PC/ATs came out, IBM released a
special version of the PC/XT that contained three cards (2 68000 CPUs and
one 3270 emulator) that turned the PC into a 0.2 MIPS IBM S/370. One of the
68000 CPUs was custom microprogrammed by IBM to execute S/370 instructions.
Cute trick, even if 0.2 MIPS performance made the product a total flop.
BV> If IBM had not knocked on their door what would have happened.
Microsoft would still have sold their BASIC interpreters and compilers,
their C/C++ compilers, their FORTRAN compilers, their macro assemblers,
their word processors, and spreadsheets, and database managers, etc., etc.,
etc.. The one thing that Microsoft did and still does well is adapt to
market conditions.
BV> Bill Gates was quoted as saying...
I'm sure that we can both come up with dozens of Bill Gates predictions that
didn't come true. The truth is that he was right often enough to become the
world's richest man. Does it really matter that he was occasionally wrong?
Certainly not to him and his billions it doesn't. Finding Bill Gates
predictions that failed kind of makes me think of someone who says, "Yeah,
but Wayne Gretzky sometimes missed the net." :-)
BV> Somewhere I even have a TRS80 Model I to S100 adaptor interface card.
Now that I would have liked to have!
Claudio Puviani
They DID leverage the whole SW base. Ironically, MS-DOS 1.0 was more
compatible with CP/M-80 than CP/M-86 was. That's how programs like dBase II,
WordStar, SuperCalc, and a host of PD programs were ported so fast.
Compare the MS-DOS, CP/M-80, and CP/M-86 APIs and you'll see that MS-DOS and
CP/M-80 are similar to the point of almost warranting a law suit. DRI, in
their less-than-infinite wisdom, decided to "improve" on CP/M-86, thus
making ports more difficult. Oh, if you were one of the three people who
programmed in PL/M, you would have found CP/M-86 preferable, but for the
rest of the universe, it begged the question "Why?".
Claudio Puviani
Frank Durda IV
: Well Gates thought the future was in Unix. And he loudly
: proclaimed that - before IBM knocked on his door.
Uh, not loudly enough to actually cause any change. If so, he should have
done more to get IBM to build a slightly better piece of hardware, something
that could run the XENIX (V7 port) being developed by a couple of guys at
Microsoft* at the same time Bill and Paul were running out and buying the
Seattle Software 8086 PC-DOS knock-off of CP/M. Of course, CP/M itself is an
almost exact knock off of DECs PDP-11 OS, RT-11, an operating system that
dates back to the early seventies, and RT-11 shows its roots in TOPS-10,
which goes back another year or two. For some reason, all the historians
tracing the source of MS-DOS mysteriously stop at CP/M, even when command sets
and utility syntaxes are compared side-by-side. Who had a PIP utility first?
Why, DEC, not Digital Research.
The joke in the seventies that "Digital Research" was a typographical error
and the companies real name was "Digital [Equipment Corporation] Rehashed",
for RT-11, TOPS-10 and RSTS/E all predated CP/M by a lot and yet have the same
command syntax.
When I was shown an Heath system running CP/M, the very first CP/M system
I had ever touched, I discovered I already knew all of the commands and
even knew some of the ones that were implemented CP/M but not documented in
the manuals. This really annoyed the owner of the machine, as I knew more
CP/M commands than he did and he had studied the manuals carefully.
Anyway, with the slightest modifications to the original PC design, a
very simple protected memory environment could have been created with offset
and limit registers, allowing for a real usable UNIX port (say XENIX) to
be used on the box. Bill and crowd came into the PC project early enough
and with sufficient input to the design for it to have gone this direction,
but it did not happen. That's why DOS was a 16-bit OS (RT-11), feature-reduced
it to fit on an 8-bit platform (CP/M), and expanded back to an 8/16-bit
platform (IBM PC), with Microsoft eventually adding back most of the features
that had been in RT-11 in the first place, things like subdirectories, hard
disk support, etc. Pity they didn't copy the programmers APIs as well.
* The earliest XENIX release didn't appear until late 1982, almost a year
after it would have been needed for the IBM PC, but then they changed their
minds on what platform they were writing for at least once AND only had a
few people assigned full time to the XENIX project. If Microsoft really put
resources to it, at least a first version could have been out in 1981,
and certainly could have matched the stability and utility of PC-DOS 1.0.
Frank Durda IV - only this address works:|"The Knights who say "LETNi"
<uhclem.mar00%nemesis.lonestar.org> | demand... A SEGMENT REGISTER!!!"
|"A what?"
This Anti-spam address expires Mar. 31st |"LETNi! LETNi! LETNi!" - 1983
Copr. 2000, ask before reprinting.
wdg...@home.com
>
> * The earliest XENIX release didn't appear until late 1982, almost a year
> after it would have been needed for the IBM PC, but then they changed their
> minds on what platform they were writing for at least once AND only had a
> few people assigned full time to the XENIX project. If Microsoft really put
> resources to it, at least a first version could have been out in 1981,
> and certainly could have matched the stability and utility of PC-DOS 1.0.
I thought Altos was shipping Xenix a full year before we were? Or
am I just remembering the marketing hype?
--
Ward Griffiths wdg...@home.com http://members.home.net/wdg3rd/
"It is not merely that I dislike, distrust and disbelieve anyone who
seeks political office. I would extend privacy rights even to
politicians were it not for two countervailing circumstances. First,
they themselves violate privacy rights wholesale. They regulate
virtually everything that peaceful people can do behind closed doors,
from taking drugs to having sex. It is elitist hypocrisy for them to
demand the privacy rights that they routinely deny to ordinary people.
If a politician wishes me to respect his personal life, then he needs
to respect mine." Wendy McElroy
Kenneth Brody
>
> Frank Durda IV wrote:
> >
> > * The earliest XENIX release didn't appear until late 1982, almost a year
> > after it would have been needed for the IBM PC, but then they changed their
> I thought Altos was shipping Xenix a full year before we were? Or
> am I just remembering the marketing hype?
If by "we" you mean Tandy, I do recall that Tandy was originally looking
at a different Unix-like system called (IIRC) Unos. I don't recall the
platform that we received to start writing Profile 16 even before Tandy
had a system for it.
In fact, didn't TRS-Xenix have a TRS-DOS-to-Xenix converter program that
was originally called "tu" (TRS-DOS-to-Unos) and then renamed "tx"?
--
+---------+----------------------------------+-----------------------------+
| Kenneth | kenb...@bestweb.net | "The opinions expressed |
| J. | | herein are not necessarily |
| Brody | http://www.bestweb.net/~kenbrody | those of fP Technologies." |
+---------+----------------------------------+-----------------------------+
GCS (ver 3.12) d- s+++: a C++$(+++) ULAVHSC^++++$ P+>+++ L+(++) E-(---)
W++ N+ o+ K(---) w@ M@ V- PS++(+) PE@ Y+ PGP-(+) t+ R@ tv+() b+
DI+(++++) D---() G e* h---- r+++ y?
sola...@don'tmesswithtexas.net
>The company was broken up, and bits and pieces were sold off to whomever
>would buy them. Even the name was sold to some Taiwanese company so now
>you can buy Digital Research CD drives, video cards, etc. They have no
>connection, other than the name, to the DR of CP/M fame. You can
>download DR-DOS and CP/M (at least the 2.2 stuff) from
>http://www.lineo.com/ IIRC.
That's the site for DR-DOS, although I'm not sure about the CP/M...
Lineo (a spinoff of Caldera) is continuing to support and develop DR-DOS
for the embedded-systems market - in fact, we're going to use it in the new
system we're developing at where I work.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
BREAK UP MICROSOFT!!
(Preferably with a wrecking ball and some dynamite.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
solarfox@DON'TMESSWITHtexas.net (Gary Akins jr.)
http://lonestar.texas.net/~solarfox
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sylvan Butler
>I'd agree that CPM was the defacto. It seems that the IBM guys had no clue
>as to what the defacto OS or they didn't care because they went to see BillG
They actually tried to see GaryK, but he was out playing and missed the
appointment. Strike 1. Then he did create CP/M-86 for the PC, but
didn't want to do it on IBMs schedule and terms. Strike 2. PC-DOS was
selling for about $50, and CP/M-86 was selling for $350-$500. Strike 3.
GaryK and Digital Research were out.
In the next inning DR cloned MS-DOS, calling it DR-DOS. By the time it
was in version 4 it was pretty good, versions 5 and 6 were a great
product. But it was late. Strike 1. MS kept breaking it. Strike 2.
And DR ran out of money. Strike 3.
The company was broken up, and bits and pieces were sold off to whomever
would buy them. Even the name was sold to some Taiwanese company so now
you can buy Digital Research CD drives, video cards, etc. They have no
connection, other than the name, to the DR of CP/M fame. You can
download DR-DOS and CP/M (at least the 2.2 stuff) from
http://www.lineo.com/ IIRC.
sdb
--
| Sylvan Butler | Not speaking for Hewlett-Packard | sbutler-boi.hp.com |
| Watch out for my e-mail address. Thank UCE. #### change ^ to @ #### |
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. --Benjamin Franklin, 1759
"Don't Tread On Me!"
Frank Durda IV
: If by "we" you mean Tandy, I do recall that Tandy was originally looking
: at a different Unix-like system called (IIRC) Unos. I don't recall the
: platform that we received to start writing Profile 16 even before Tandy
: had a system for it.
Charles Rivers UNOS. They had been selling their UNIX V7 port named UNOS for
perhaps a year, mainly for their own hardware, which had a frog as a corporate
logo. I've still got one of their trade-show toys somewhere.
After the debacle of TRSDOS-16 became completely clear to even the thickest
Tandy marketing droid*, the "merchies" began demanding a replacement OS.
UNOS appeared to be a workable alternative system that would have to go
through the fewest hoops to run on the M16 platform as UNOS was already
running on 68000 processors with limited memory management hardware.
* A magazine review started with the question "How is a Model 16 like a
bowling ball? Because you can get the same amount of software for each!"
This was not a promising beginning to a review of the product.
Internally, TRSDOS-16 was known from that point on as "Bowling Ball DOS".
And then came the well-publicized lawsuits from Model 16 owners. The
reviewers liked the hardware, but hated the OS.
About the time UNOS port work got underway, Microsoft began contacting Tandy
corporate and Tandy merchandising about MS doing an OS (XENIX) for the
Model 16, but Tandy was currently mad at Bill Gates/Microsoft (probably because
of the IBM PC/PC-DOS, which Tandy felt ripped-off Tandy functions and features)
and told MS to drop dead. Tandy execs expected some higher level of loyalty
to Tandy from Microsoft - boy, were they stupid. Anyway, Microsoft then asked
Tandy for hardware programming specifications on the M16 so they could develop
and market XENIX on their own. (Microsoft may have been really smart or
really stupid in suggesting this, but that is another story.) Tandy told
MS to double-drop-dead and did not want to discuss XENIX at all, ever again.
Microsoft then went at it alone and developed the prototype version of XENIX
for the Model 16 from what they could figure out from the service and
technical reference manuals (it barely worked and would fall over if you
looked at it sideways), much to the initial annoyance of Tandy.
In fact, Tandy was tricked into even seeing the XENIX demo which they had
previously said they wanted no part of, and Tandy would never have bought
XENIX, but Microsoft held out "a deal" like this:
If you buy XENIX, we'll throw in BASIC and Multiplan for free. If you
don't buy XENIX, we won't ever do a port of BASIC or Multiplan for Tandy.
You might recognize this as an early example of Microsoft "Tying" or "Bundling"
products, an illegal thing that you just couldn't get the feds interested in
back in 1982, but in 1995 they finally went after Windows/Exploder bundling.
(No wonder Microsoft acted surprised when the DOJ went after them since they
had been doing this stuff for over a decade.) So, feeling partly blackmailed
and a lot greedy, Tandy bit the bait and took XENIX and dropped UNOS.
The Tandy people doing the UNOS port were completely unaware of these Microsoft
activities until they found out that the almost-complete UNOS port project was
being scrapped in favor of XENIX, a decision that had been made by Tandy
merchandising two weeks earlier but not told to the programmers who were
working all hours to finish the now-doomed UNOS project. To add insult, the
same programmers were now assigned the task of showing Microsoft how to make
XENIX stay up for more than a minute at a time on the Model 16 and to rewrite
the Microsoft Z80/68000 drivers that turned out to only be enough to make the
sale of XENIX to Tandy but not good enough for Tandy to actually sell to
anyone who would want it to use the system for anything.
This change in direction threatened to delay the delivery of a replacement for
TRSDOS-16 by as long as a year, but Tandy and Microsoft solved this by
using a technique still kept alive by Microsoft: release beta versions as
though they were real and just keep sending out more stable versions, selling
them as upgrades if possible, which reduced the additional delay to four
months. Yeah, you guessed it. The first TRS-XENIX "released" was so
unstable, the stores were ordered to not actually sell or give it to anybody,
just show it to angry TRSDOS-16 customers as a stalling tactic to keep them
from returning Model 16 systems or suing, a rare form of positive FUD (Fear
Uncertainity, Doubt), known as "RSH", or Rescue, Salvation and Hope.
Tandy then broke XENIX bundle into two chunks (core, development and text
processing - later text processing was also made separate) and sold them
separately, as well as selling BASIC and Multiplan - which they got
royalty-free - separately. The reason floated at the time was that the
customer would be overwhelmed by receiving an OS that came on 16 floppies and
eight manual binders when TRSDOS-16 came on two and you only had to use one
while installing or accessing old software. Read on and you can decide if
that concern was just a load of rubbish or not.
The XENIX bundle cost Tandy about $85US per unit (most of that being the
AT&T UNIX per-CPU royalty), and Tandy resold this as:
XENIX Core Free, if you bought a system it came with or
if you had an earlier Model 16A AND you yelled
loud and long enough, otherwise pay
$395.00 US (26-6400)
Development System $750.00 US (26-6401)
BASIC Interpreter $299.00 US (26-6457)
Multiplan $349.00 US (26-6480)
--------------
Total to get what Tandy
paid Microsoft $85 for $1,793.00 US
Tandy clearly had development, printing, duplication, distribution and
support costs, but probably not enough to justify a twenty-one thousand
percent markup. R&D got a piece of eight percent markup over the build cost
of whatever the factory made to fund our division, so my group wasn't seeing
those profit margins. Most of that pure-profit money stayed at the stores.
Frank Durda IV - only this address works:|"Steve, are you pondering what I'm
<uhclem.mar00%nemesis.lonestar.org> | pondering?" "I think so, Bill, but
| I thought it was only supposed to
This Anti-spam address expires Mar. 31st | be a three hour tour."
Bill Vermillion
<slrn8bor8g.ud4.no...@hpb13799z.zboi.hpz.com.invalid>,
Sylvan Butler <nospam+_n...@hpb13799z.zboi.hpz.com.invalid>
wrote:
>On Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:22:16 -0800, ven reddy <v...@xtracool.com>
>wrote:
>>I'd agree that CPM was the defacto. It seems that the IBM guys had
>>no clue as to what the defacto OS or they didn't care because they
>>went to see BillG first instead of GaryK. I would think they would
>>have gone for CPM and
>In the next inning DR cloned MS-DOS, calling it DR-DOS. By the
>time it was in version 4 it was pretty good, versions 5 and 6 were
>a great product. But it was late. Strike 1. MS kept breaking it.
>Strike 2. And DR ran out of money. Strike 3.
>You can download DR-DOS and CP/M (at least the 2.2
>stuff) from http://www.lineo.com/ IIRC.
Yup. That's the spin-off from Caldera. Did you see that they won
the suit against MS - because of the things MS did to make DR-DOS
look bad - like test for presence of it and then put up warning
messages.
Details of the settlement weren't announced, but MS gave the amount
it would impact their stock and it figured out to be about
a $150 - $175 million settlement. The Lineo site is the embedded
Linux and they have an embedded Dr Dos. The Calders site has
DR DOS on CD