Slashdot Mirror
25 Years After DOS - Lessons for Linux?
E IS mC(Square) writes "Microsoft is planning to celebrate 25 years of DOS. An article at ReallyLinux discusses what lessons Linux can learn from the history of DOS. The article begins with 'What can the Linux world learn from Microsoft's past 25 years of unique experiences and domination?', and ends with 'Only question now is not if but when will Linux become the number one OS on earth?'" From the article: "First, we must admit openly once and for all that the 'best solution' is not always the 'most used solution.' There are few who would be foolish enough to argue that back in 1981 PC-DOS was the best solution. There were obviously a number of choices. PC-DOS was the least robust, the most temperamental, and arguably not very compatible with the IBM hardware and BIOS it was sold to work on. Yet, somewhat like the odd but obvious dominance of the VHS over BETA, this simple, cheap OS stole the show."
I'm sure Linux could learn a lot by including a DOS utility... preferably pointed at Microsoft's servers?
My UID is prime... is yours?
This topic has been covered millions of times. "It's not if, it's when Linux will..." and finish the quote with some audacious goal. If Linux can solve the problems, let it. If it can't, then fine. Do we really need to regurgitate this same idea over and over again?
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
This is the attitude that is going to prevent that from ever happening. I wish the movers and shakers in the Linux world would decide to focus on a subset of the OS market, and do it well, instead of trying to do everything and losing focus of good engineering practices...
In other news the bacteria E.Coli is celebrating a glorious million year aniversary as the intestinal parasite of choice when it comes to sudden, explosive diarrhea.
Seriously, the only, and I mean ONLY good thing about dos was when you programmed for it, it got the hell out of the way and let you at the hardware. Software got full control of the machine at execution, giving great performance (which mattered at the time) and more reliable software. The only downside was a complete lack of library infrastructure for functionality sharing beyond simple io. Well that and the whole "ssh! pretend its a 8Mhz 8088" real-mode limitation.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
There's nothing odd about the dominance of vhs over beta. Vhs had porn, beta did not.
Ultimately, nobody gives a damn what OS is running. Looking at the historical ups and downs of DOS in and of itself is a useless exercise in intellectual masturbation.
People buy computers because of applications, not operating systems. Although Microsoft has managed to turn the OS into the application, the best, most solid systems respect the separation of OS and application. The only thing worthy of analysis relative to all this is the fact that MS's bloating up of DOS with a GUI and bundled apps ended up delivering them market share. But ultimately nobody ever chose a PC based on the OS... never, ever. They may have chosen a PC/OS based on the applications available for the OS, but with the exception of just a few, most computer users don't care what's under the hood as long as it gets them from point A to point B.
That's the way it was, is, and always will be. This holds true for everything from cell phones to console gaming. The system with the most versatility and functionality will win out in the absence of any domineering marketing campaign (which has a tendency of nullifying objectivity).
1. DOS was stable.
2. Because DOS was stable, developers were more comfortable developing applications for it.
3. Because there were more applications available for DOS, it garnered market share.
#2 is the key to it all... Had the first IBM PC been more closed like the Macintosh, the whole industry may have evolved differently. Had the TRS-80 been easier to hack and upgrade, we'd all probably be using TRSDOS v900. Had Apple not decided to turn their backs on the great original idea of embracing third party development when they went the route of Mac/Lisa, we'd all probably be using Apples. It's all about the applications, and how those who develop systems pander to the widest array of appdev talent.
What's funny is what's happened to the software development industry. I'd bet even today, 10+ years after the demise of DOS as a viable platform, there are still more DOS apps than Windows apps. So MS's pie-in-the-sky-OS idea has hurt the industry as a whole by crippling independent software development. That's what we can learn from this whole mess.
For those who are not aware, the genesis of DOS began in deceipt and treachery.
...most people have no idea that he is, in fact, the original inventor of the PC operating system.
You list no such deceit or treachery. All you list is Gary Kildall giving IBM the brushoff. Give credit where credit is due, the fault for CPM/86's failure in the mass market needs to be given to Mr. Kildall.
Then, Gates bought PC-DOS from Seattle Computer Products.
Nothing treacherous or deceitful about that.
An engineer, Tim Paterson, at that company had stolen the ideas of CPM/86 and created a cheap clone of it.
Thank you, Darl MacBride. Was there a patent on CPM/86? No, there wasn't, so no ideas where "stolen", because no ideas were sold. The implementation for CPM/86 itself (copyright) was not copied, modified or distributed. Hence, no "stolen" operating system.
He created a clone of CPM/86, in EXACTLY the same way Linus Torvalds created a clone of Minix/Unix. Why is Tim the thief but not Linus? Oh that's right, in your Darl MacBride world, Linus "stole" Unix. Sigh.
Inventor? What a load of crap! Next you'll be telling me that AT&T/USL/Caldera/SCO were the orginal inventors of Linux!
The greatest insult was, ultimately, assigning the name "William H. Gates" to the Stanford Computer Science building.
It was William H. Gates who donated money to Stanford, not Gary Kildall. Which is why Gar Kildall doesn't have a Stanford campus building named after him. This is so bloody obvious that only a total moron would question it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
MS-DOS was one of three different operating systems offered on IBM PCs when they first came out.
And it wasn't even the cheapest one (I believe that was the UCSD P-System).
But it WAS the only one that ran Lotus 1-2-3.
It's the apps, silly.
As it is this article is a factless, pointless rant about Microsoft. It doesn't answer the question it purports to ask ("What can the Linux world learn from Microsoft's past 25 years of unique experiences and domination?") at all. It does however spew every bit of geek lore that makes geeks feel all fuzzy inside knowing how 'superior' they are, regardless of the facts or relevance.
If it were posted on /., it would be modded right up to the stratosphere. As an example of Linux journalism - it's pretty sad.
Hnm...I worked at Digital Research for three summers while I was in high school and college. I don't think what you're saying really holds water. CP/M was a nice enough OS in some ways, but it was painfully primitive by modern standards. Rumor had it that Kildall wrote the original CP/M over a weekend on a handy machine he had access to at the Naval Postgraduate School. It was a very basic, bare-bones OS, and it was by no means a state-of-the-art OS compared to, say, Unix; but that's not surprising, because it had to run in a 64k address space.
I also don't think it's accurate to portray Gary Kildall as a naive engineer who didn't know business. Digital Research was quite a successful business by the standards of a time when "microcomputer" users were mostly hobbyists. The story about his being out flying his plane when IBM showed up for the meeting is memorable, but probably untrue. A more believable version that I've heard is that IBM wanted Kildall and his wife to sign NDA's, and they refused. That wasn't as crazy as it might seem today. IBM had never even entered the microcomputer market. In the world of microcomputers, DRI was the big, established, dominant company, and IBM was trying to break in.
Actually, TFA isn't referring to CP/M at all:
- Look I say this with caution but sincerity since I began using DOS around the same time I had used UNIX and its variants, VMS, Stratus VOS and others.
VMS and Unix were indeed much more sophisticated than PC-DOS (or CP/M), but, uh, you couldn't run them in a 64k address space. People had made various trimmed-down 8-bit versions of Unix (proprietary, of course), but they weren't as sophiaticated as real Unix.From the article:
- My only question now is not if but when will Linux become the number one OS on earth?
Sorry, but this is really dopey. The historical stuff he's talking about isn't parallel to the modern situation at all. Some crucial differences:Find free books.
"Socially, the vacuum was created by greed.
...
A friend of mine told me he thinks that if Microsoft released just 10% of the roughly $2 BILLION in CASH (does not include other assets) to help curb diseases and help starvation, many people could be helped."
I was uneasy reading this OP/Ed piece. But once I got to the "social" problem, I stopped reading. So, what charitable organization has the one of the largest endowments in the world? That would be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that has an endowment of roughly $29 billion. And what do they focus on? Global health problems like HIV/AIDS in Africa and education.
So only Microsoft should be held to this lofty standard of donating 10% of its cash to help the needy? Why not every company? Why shouldn't Ford donate 10% of its cash hoard (~$10 billion). What about Apple's $6 billion cash hoard? Or what about ordinary people? Why don't we require everyone to donate 10% of their savings account? Because Micro$oft is evil and should give back? As soon as I read this I knew this op/ed piece was a waste.
OS/2 was ahead of it's time, containing many of the features that would later help Windows 95 (and no, it didn't come out too soon to take advantage of them), however it was hobbled by IBM's lack of internet in the home market.
First, while IBM had a full licence deal to use Windows 3.1 (a bit remaining from the whole OS2/NT partnership), they made no real effort to make it work well inside their fancy 32bit OS (starting Windows programs resulted in a copy of Windows 3.1 actually being booted up just for that program). The care taken for supporting old DOS programs (which they didn't need Microsoft's help for) was even worse - while Windows 95 needed tweaking options too, OS/2 presented users with a huge checklist that had to have been literally copied straight from the constant names in the C header file (the option names even included the underscore). The options where so badly labeled that even an expert had a hard time figuring out what each option did, let alone what option should be used to get a program to run. It would have taken less then a day for someone at IBM to actually enter user readable options to run DOS applications - but IBM didn't give a shit.
Now poor DOS and Windows 3.1 support wouldn't completely doom OS/2. Even Windows 95 only included the (not always working) support so that users and companies could migrate to native 32bit apps. What really helped kill OS/2 Warp was that IBM was still sitting on it's high horse, demanding developers pay them just for the privilege of writing native OS/2 [Warp] applications. In the end OS/2 Warp suffered the self inflicted fate of many of Microsoft's competitors - fantastic platform, pity I can't actually run anything on it (Apple, despite having a strong niche market, fell into much the same trap in the late 80s when it got full of itself and bullied it's own third party developers, reducing them from a 10% market share to just 3% in a matter of years)
IBM's $39.95 DOS while CP/M was $450 and UCSD p-System was $550. http://pcworld.about.com/magazine/1908p133id52503. htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc