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You can see details of Digital Research losing out to MS/DOS here:

http://www.digitalresearch.biz...

and it is clear that DR had plenty of "opportunity".

http://www.businessweek.com/st...
http://www.groklaw.net/article...
http://www.basicallytech.com/b...
http://www.digitalresearch.biz...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
"The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

Yet, consider what came from Chuck Moore of pre-Bayh-Dole true academic traditions of MIT & Stanford and then internal support in manufacturing and then supporting government-funded Astronomical research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://www.colorforth.com/HOPL...
"NRAO, 1971 ... NRAO appreciated what I had wrought. They had an arrangement with a consulting firm to identify spin-off technology. The issue of patenting Forth was discussed at length. But since software patents were controversial and might involve the Supreme Court, NRAO declined to pursue the matter. Whereupon, rights reverted to me. I don't think ideas should be patentable. Hindsight agrees that Forth's only chance lay in the public domain. Where it has flourished."

Forth still can be a great BIOS and command line system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

Although IBM deserves credit for popularizing the VM idea with System 360 and then VM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

Smalltalk by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others was a another great option.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Kildall, Moore, and Kay/Ingalls all got the idea of virtual machines (with their own ways). Lisp-ers may have got a bit of that too.

We had choices as a society. I saw some of them first hand in the 1970s and 1980s when I started in computing. I bought Forth cartridges for the Commodore VIC and C64. I worked very briefly on a computer with CP/M (although using Forth on it though). The OS choice pushed by the person born with a million dollar trust fund who "dumpster dived" for OS listings won (who did little of the development work himself) -- with an empire built on QDOS which has shaky legal standing as a clone of CP/M which is probably why IBM did not buy it itself. And we were the worse for it as a society IMHO.
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
http://www.complex.com/tech/20...

But that problematical path would not have been possible without political and legal decisions to base the development of computing around the idea of "artificial scarcity" via copyright

I like pretty much everything you said, except CP/M came from Digital Research not Digital Equipment. http://www.digitalresearch.biz/CPM.HTM

Your whole argument that it "ran on non-x86 processors" is a complete logical non-sequitur. What does one have to do with the other? You do realize that these two things are not related, right?

You do realize that MS-DOS was written for and runs exclusively on Intel 8086-compatible CPUs, right? It was not written in portable C code. It is inextricably tied to the platform. The only way to run MS-DOS on non-x86 computers is using an x86 emulator.

On the other hand, "A main design goal of NT was hardware and software portability". Windows NT uses a Virtual DOS machine for running DOS programs, but that plays no role in the kernel, drivers, or other essential operating system functionality. Windows NT has run natively on at least Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS, and Itanium in addition to 386 and x86_64. To run MS-DOS programs on any of the non-x86 ports of NT requires full CPU emulation, not just a Virtual DOS machine.

The first thing Novell did when they acquired SuSE was change the name to SUSE. Sort of thing that separates the amateurs from the pros. Like when Intergalactic Digital Research switched to a grownup name.

> That's nice - so, what you're saying is that DR DOS was a replacement to DR DOS?

use your brain: it was an obvious typo

> Also, your story about how MS-DOS beat out CPM/86 is just misinformed.

use google:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS - provides some general history
      http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM - describes some history of the DR blowoff of ibm

I was a heavy user of DR DOS when Microsoft was struggling to close the gap between ms dos 4.1 & dr dos 5.0. And got to watch first hand as Microsoft killed a superior product.

People on Slashdot love claiming that MS has intentionally broken competitor's applications on Windows or DOS, but nobody is ever able to produce a single shred of actual evidence to support this claim. Sorry, but just because the claim is repeated thousands of times in a Google search result doesn't make it true.

Microsoft tried multiple times to get the court to throw the case out before the actual trial, and when that didn't work they settled with Caldera for an undisclosed (but allegedly massive) sum of money. I guess one could argue that the case isn't clear because of that... but go read the court docs.

History of MS-DOS by Leven Antov http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM 'nuff said

There's an interesting History of MS-DOS By: Leven Antov at http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM

Yeah, I think you're right. The z80 had a larger instruction set. Digital Research (originally called Intergalactic Digital Reasearch!) has an interesteing story more history at http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM