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MS-DOS Is 30 Years Old Today
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."
First shitty pOSt
A 63-year-old American man with a hernia plunged a butter knife into his abdomen to try to fix the problem, and later put a lit cigarette in the wound, according to police.
Police found the man lying naked on the porch of his apartment in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale in California Sunday night after his wife called to report his attempt at surgery, Glendale police spokesman Sergeant Tom Lorenz said.
"He actually impaled himself with the butter knife," Lorenz said. "He told his wife he was frustrated with this hernia, and he didn't want to wait any longer for the medical procedure."
Police officers watched as the man, after pulling the knife out of his abdomen, put a lit cigarette into the wound, Lorenz said.
"I don't know if it was an attempt to cauterize or anything," he said.
Police did not identify the man, but Lorenz said he committed no crime and was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. He was taken to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, where he was put on a 72-hour psychiatric hold, police said.
The hospital was expected to perform the surgery to fix his hernia, Lorenz said.
Cue a gazillion posts by depressed old farts noticing that they are, in fact, old farts.
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For Microsoft.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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
DOS is still being used in some places...
Palm trees and 8
I remember the big jump from DOS 1.0 to 2.0... They added subdirectories (folders)! what a concept.
I still occasionally boot up machines with MSDOS v6.22 ... in order to run my copy of WordPerfect v5.1 :-)
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few of years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools
I think that IBM was 'approached' by MS. Gates' mother had contacts through her role as a high ranking official in the United Way. That got Bill a foot in the door and he made good on the opportunity. Major successes are often a convergence of skill, ambition and blind luck, and the MS fortune is, I think, one of those cases.
The MS-DOS acronym It always made me wonder. If QDOS was Quick and Dirty Operating System, then surely MS-DOS is Microsoft Dirty Operating System. It's a weird way to brand your product.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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play some crappy old games on my Tandy tonight. It has outlived 14 PC's i have bought since. Good old TLX1000 with a hard drive and single 3.5" floopy drive.
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.
Gary Kildall was heard to remark, "I'm glad I missed that silly meeting so I'd have time to think. Let's do right by our customers... we'll need a multi-tasking operating system from the get-go with 32-bit CPUs and 3 GB RAM."
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?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
This makes me feel old...
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Worked well for who? Could we imagine a world without Microsoft? Could it have been better than it is today?
Isn't MS pretty much irrelevant now anyway. They can't really compete in large computer clusters (you can find some cases, but it is due to marketing FUD and leads to a severely crippled system typically), and it look like they aren't even trying to compete in the small personal computing device market: smart phones, pads, etc... How it still has it's strangle hold on the PC market, I can't comprehend (except that there really is something to marketing, isn't there). I do use MS in some cases, but the OS is irrelevant at this point. I refuse to use software that is not open source (except games. Damn you MS and your evil business practices. But there should be a solution for that at some point. Qt, OpenGL and Wine already does a decent job to bridge this gap). Cygwin makes MS bearable IMO (WTH would I do without a bash shell and perl). I think MS needs to focus on the XBox where they have a good chance to use monopoly powers to control the market.
They're not crappy! They're vintage!
Besides, with a lot of them, adventure and rpg specially, you had to use your imagination to complete the mental scenery. Just like a reading book.
C:\dos
C:\dos\run
run\dos\run
Long-live 4DOS, Cygwin, and of course UNIX and Linux. I have *NO* fond memories of MS-DOS at all. Only frustration and a faint nostalgic feeling of "What the hell were they thinking by using backslashes?", the bane of touch-typists everywhere because they never had a standard keyboard position.
I miss the days of the ROM OS. Turn on the computer and it's booted and ready before the monitor was even warmed up. But even in the 80s Microsoft wrote bloated inefficient code. After using their Disk Extended Color Basic for several years I was able to rewrite the initialization code saving several hundred bytes, enough to add several customized DOS functions, and burned my own EPROM.
Yeah, mostly on Linux boxes by old-fart gamers who need it to play Lode Runner or some other "legacy" diversion.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Of course MS-DOS, or any other DOS-like "operating system" (it's really nothing more than a loader) is utter crap when measured by todays standards. But because DOS was such a massive platform in its day, there is a gigantic wealth of applications and games for it. Especially most of the games are still great when played today. That's why DosBox is such an amazing piece of software: it lets anyone tap into that extremely large pool of really cool stuff. Even though I've played loads of those kind of games, I still discover new and fun ones from time to time and I have a great time with them. So I guess in the end, MS-DOS isn't so bad after all.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
"the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed". Did it now? It only worked out well for Microsoft. It did not work out well for IBM and it did not work out well for general interoperability.
Bleary eyed, but still pretty good at playing some older games.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
...the IBM/Microsoft partnership worked out rather well indeed.
Well for whom ? Bill Gates, sure. IBM wasn't very happy with it by the end. The rest of us...
MS did not own QDOS when they sold it to IBM. Oh, and Bill Gate's mother was on the board of IBM. And what a crap OS DOS was; it held the industry back 10 years. Thankfully MS no longer has that sort of power; you could tell they were slipping when they failed to smother the Internet and force everybody onto MSN. Now, the only real drag they can impose on progress is via patent shakedowns.
One of mine said you have to declare any number you use as a constant in the beginning, and that means any number. If he saw a number used in your code, points taken off.
That meant "x*2" to double something once in your whole program was bad. You had to declare a constant in the beginning called "double" or some such, and then make it "x*double". A reasonably good practice taken to the absurd extreme.
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.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
ECHO ON ECHO HAPPY BIRTHDAY MS-DOS ECHO OFF The oldest version that I have ran is MS-DOS 1.25 on an old Toshiba laptop using bubble memory cartridges! SYS64738 DocMAME
To be honest, UNIX ran poorly on under-powered x86 chips until well into the 1990s. In fact MicroSoft owned PC UNIX, called Xenix , around the time it started DOS, then off-loaded it to SCO.
Happy B-day DOS you have been a great help
My first computer was a Tandy 1000EX (then a 1000TX, 286, yeah baby). I got an expanded memory card for my 1000TX all the way up to1.5MB total RAM. Setup a RAM drive on the memory card and wrote a batch file to copy the OS and commonly used utilites to the RAM drive, then set the COMSPEC to it. Was really useful until I got a hard rive. I was working at Radio Shack at the time and made full use of my measly employee discount.
I sorta miss the days off Plug'n'Pray ISA cards (normally just manually set them anyway, as it never seemed to work). My experience with DOS 1.0 was on my uncles Zenith computer. I remember DOS 2.x needed the hard drive driver loaded to work off a hard drive. I used every version of MS-DOS from 2.11 on up. I hated the built in compression, in the later versions, too flaky. Version 5 and 6.22 were my favorites.
may well remain the same operation andH help us! a8e inherently
Finally, after 30 years I can upgrade!!
Does anyone know where I can get a copy of windows 3.0?
Sounds like a win to me.
Yes win for MS, win for IBM...shame about us users though, isn't it!
then there was TSX Lite, which was 100% dos compatible, and had a DAMN FAST cache system. First start of nc would take a couple seconds as usual. Next invocation was almost immediate. I got the shareware version out of a bbs in the 90s.
Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.
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.
It's interesting, almost anything that isn't Windows is based on UNIX/Linux. (Maybe other things in embedded systems or whatever.) So MS-DOS is at the base of the only big alternative.
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Balance is struck, Antibacterial sOap. Then Jordan Hubbard
Come on slashdot. If the above post is truly insightful, then why haven't I learned anything of value from it?
Because it's not insightful at all, that's why. You've probably heard this a thousand times, but slashdot WAS better 10 years ago before it was overrun by teenagers caring more about personal bickering than technology.
I will guarantee you that not only was the above post written by a teenager, but everybody who modded him up is also in fact a teenager. Any modders care to refute this?
DOS was never intended to be a huge and all-powerful operating system. it was designed for the machines of the time, which were snails compared to the beasts you can buy today. you couldnt have the operating system eating up all your resources, because there wasn't much to go around. smaller was better. it did what it was supposed to do, and it did it reliably.
go back to the early 80's and try using an original IBM PC. the CPU is so slow you can usually watch the text being drawn out on the screen.
well to be more accurate, while the 8088 was brutally slow, it's not really what bottlenecked the text being drawn but the CGA video cards of the time had single-ported memory, meaning that if the CPU was accessing the video RAM while the card was also reading it to find out what to draw on the screen, you would get snow because the CPU was blocking it's access.
most DOSes and/or BIOS video routines wait until the monitor's vblank period, where it wasn't drawing the screen, before accessing the video memory. this is why the text updated so slowly that you could see it being drawn.
yes, computers fucking sucked 30 years ago. i'm not an old fart really, i'm only 27 but i have a soft spot for vintage computers. they bring back lots of good memories for me even though they are garbage in the technological sense. i'm in the middle of writing a full TCP/IP stack as a TSR in pure 8086 assembly, because i am a nerdpole. developing and testing the whole thing on my (still working!) 1982 IBM 5150 PC. it's two years older than i am. :)
Obviously IBM was pretty damn generous in it's dealing with Microsoft, what the heck was Digital holding out for?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Yeah, the partnership was so successful that IBM eventually launched it's own OS (OS2) in an attempt to retake the PC market, which failed and lead to their exit from the PC business all together. Yes, IBM survived, but it's a shadow of what it used to be. Ask any of their many ex-employees.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
If you're a time traveller reading this, take a hint... you know... hint, hint....
Wahoo! just 60? more years until science and the useful arts will benefit from this tremendous innovation as it finally falls into the public domain.
MS-DOS did not live to be 30.
I have always wondered why IBM went shopping for an outside source to provide the OS for their new PCs? It wasn't like IBM didn't have tons of in-house OS expertise already.
Does anyone have the backstory?
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
I used (not MS) IBM-DOS v4.0 that was terrible with its low free conventional memory on my IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 10 Mhz system. 5.0 and 6.0 were awesome though. I remember its DOS Shell too. Then, came DoubleSpace (Stacker died -- I used its software, but not its hardware card), disk defragger (Norton Utilities 8.0's was better, but there was a nasty bug if you had verify=on setting that corrupted the data!), a virus scanner, etc. Oh and multi-configurations with autoexec.bat and config.sys. Fun times! :D
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The real slap in the face was when the Alpha 443a had bios changes to allow NT to be installed on it. I'm glad I'm not using my real name because I have to admit, a tear ran down my face.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I work in a manufacturing environment, a realm of time forgotten, where software once written never changes and geek has to keep an active reference machine alive for every Microsoft OS. I am still actively using MS-DOS 6.22 on machines that running test diagnostics. The old QuickBASIC program uses the serial port and does some simple things to the system to which it is connected. And I cannot escape this fate.
Bearded Dragon
MS-DOS always lagged behind DRI's products. DR-DOS 6 had disk compression a year before MS-DOS 6 was released.
It was DR-DOS that forced MS-DOS to improved. MS was happy to just keep pushing out 3.3 with its 32Mb disk limit while DR-DOS 3.4 could run 500Mb disks. MS was forced to release MS-DOS 4.01 which IBM had written. Then DR-DOS 5 started eating MS's lunch and got to about 15% market share before MS-DOS 5 came out. Soon after that DR-DOS 6 was leading on features while MS relied on illegal 'per box pricing' to hold onto the market.
I bought an Amiga 1000 on 26-Jul-86
7 years earlier I had bought my first computer (a TRS80)
In 1980 I bought my 2nd computer, that one had color, a disk drive and a keyboard with 117 keys (Compucolor II )
I didn't buy an MS-DOS machine until 1994
The machine I used the longest was an Amiga B2000 1988 to 2002 (I sold it because I left the country, it was still going at the time)
And to those people that say I am old, I'd just like to point out that I work with people who are 50 years older than me.
you could've gotten a click disabler from aminet. You still had disk detection with the disabler on. Pretty cool.
Still having fun with my newly bought A1200. 8meg GVP '030 50, indivision.
Olt-timers eh? OK, somebody's going to outdo me in the oldtimer department (at least I hope there's people older than me out there), but I haven't seen one of their posts here yet.
My credentials, I did my first, admittedly almost insignificant, bit of programming in 1966 on a PDP 8 in Fortran using punch cards. It was bad enough to make me stay away from computers for 10 years (4 of those years being in the Navy during the Viet-Nam War), but even so, I had a few years experience programming in assembler before the IBM PC came out. What made me mad was that IBM used the 8086 when the Motorola 68000 was already out, and even the Zilog Z-8000 was a lot better than the 8086. But the uninformed masses were oohing and aahing because of those 3 letters, 'IBM', on the side of the box.
I remember at my job back then, the hardware guys were always complaining about how the company we worked for always went with IBM components when somebody else's were a better deal. Hardware and software wise, it seemed like the PC was as bad as it could be and still sucker people in to using it. MS-DOS fit right in with that philosophy. (I've read that IBM's intentions were not a mass market computer but something to interface to their mainframes. I don't know if that's true, but it could explain a lot about their approach.)
Back in the 70s there had been a heady idealism about computers. Go look in old BYTE magazines to get an idea. Look at Dr Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia (Running Light Without Overbyte) for an even better idea. My brother, the hardware guy, built a homebrew computer with 256 bytes of eprom that we programmed using DIP switches so that it could read a hex touchpad. I think he got the basic plan from the 8080A Bugbook. So many possibilities! The idealism of the 60s about a lot of things was depleted, but with the home computer, it was still there. The IBM PC put an end to that as far as I'm concerned. Maybe if they had gone with Gary Kildall's operating system it would have been OK. I recommend looking for saved videos of the old Computer Chronicles TV shows hosted by Stewart Cheifeit which had Kildall as a frequent guest.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
They procured a limited set of rights.
Hence the eventual success of the lawsuit against microsoft.
As I recall it Microsoft did not 'own' the code and did not have the right to license it to IBM.
I am as shocked as you that microsoft seems to have ignored a restricted license and then trampled a company via lawyers.
No brain, no pain.
See below for what MS-DOS could have been, but wasn't. It's an excerpt from Dr. Peter Denning's Book, "The Innovator's Way: Essential Practices for Successful Innovation, MIT Press (2010)." It shows how Bill Gates, who had an inferior OS ("It took Gates another ten years to get the quality of MS-DOS up to the original CP/M system") but a better business acumen, won out and got rich. "Gary Kildall was the true father of the personal computer operating system. In his PhD research at the University of Washington in the early 1970s, he worked with one of the best-designed operating systems of all time, the Burroughs B5500, becoming thoroughly familiar with advanced concepts such as multitasking and interactive computing. Shortly thereafter, while an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, he acquired one of the new Intel 4004 process control chips for his lab. He soon realized that the 4004 was a general-purpose computer and not just a special purpose chip. He designed an operating system that used a floppy disk as its memory and incorporated the advanced concepts he had learned about operating systems. This program was called CP/M, for “control program, microprocessor”. Intel contracted with him to develop CP/M and an associated portable programming language PL/M, for the 8008 and later the 8080 chips. He started Digital Research, Inc., in Pacific Grove, to market CP/M, which quickly became the operating system of choice in the nascent microcomputer market in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, IBM decided to start its own PC effort and visited the young Bill Gates of Microsoft for an operating system. Gates referred them to Kildall. Kildall was not willing to sign IBM’s nondisclosure agreements. Miffed, IBM went back to Gates and decided to use Gate’s DOS, a quick-and-dirty CP/M knock-off. Kildall was infuriated that Gates would try to copy his software without license, but Gates, flanked by a phalanx of IBM lawyers, forced Kildall to back off. It took Gates another ten years to get the quality of MS-DOS up to the original CP/M system. Many people speculate that if Kildall had been more accommodating toward IBM, he would have closed a deal with IBM and he not Gates would be the industry’s magnate. Kildall was clearly an inventor but not a dedicated businessman; his invention made it into a relatively small market, the first PC users. Gates was not an inventor, but he was an astute businessman; he provided an innovative business model that eventually propelled Microsoft to a 90% market share of all PC operating systems. Kildall was the inventor of PC operating systems, Gates the innovator."
I'm older than DOS, thanks DOS...thank you for everything
Dual Century Programming: Yeah I know
I think that IBM was 'approached' by MS. Gates' mother had contacts through her role as a high ranking official in the United Way. That got Bill a foot in the door and he made good on the opportunity.
The geek has been peddling this story for so long it has become his gospel truth.
This is the history the IBM PC development team saw when it looked at MIcrosoft:
1975 Microcomputer BASIC for the Altair.
1976 Microcomputer BASIC sales to Fortune 500 companies like GE.
1977 Applesoft BASIC, Microsoft BASIC for the PET, TRS-80 and god alone knows how many others.
1977 Microsoft FORTRAN. Microsoft Assembler.
1978 Microsoft COBOL-80
1979 "Microsoft 8080 BASIC is the first microprocessor product to win the ICP Million Dollar [Sales] Award. Traditionally dominated by software for mainframe computers, this recognition is indicative of the growth and acceptance of the PC industry."
1979 MBASIC for the 8086
1980 Z-80 CP/M Softcard for the Apple II.
1980 16 Bit XENIX OS for the 8086 and other platforms.
Microsoft's Timeline
In 1980 Microsoft had 40 employees, revenues of $7.5 million and was clearly positioning itself to move outward from programming tools to applications and operating systems.
When Digital Research dropped the ball, Microsoft promised to deliver a serviceable 16 CP/M clone in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC. In exchange for the non-exclusive license, Microsoft proposed a barn-burning price fot its OS of $50 retail list.
20% of the projected cost of CP/M 86. These were the words IBM wanted to hear.
In related news, last month FreeDOS turned 17, and in September FreeDOS 1.0 will have been around for 5 years. They're finally gearing up for another release (low manpower and trouble with package management and the installer have hindered attempts to follow the "release early, release often" mantra), and could really use people's help testing and polishing off the 1.1 release.
Its beacuse IBM didn't think the PC was going to amount to anything, so didn't waste resources to put their good people on it. If they had decent attorneys reviewing things, that contract would never have been signed.
Sad really.
That and they colluded to be sure cp/m was unable to compete due to price.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wile i agree that the eventual standards that came out of it did help the industry overall, i do think that if IBM had not come around we would still have seen a convergence of standards by the 90's, but we still would have choices.
I could see a flicker of this before MS/IBM, just that it didn't have time to happen.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I worked with someone at IBM who at the time had an IBM Forth, but the PC division just was living in its own world. Forth would have been far more powerful and exapndable and easier to use than DOS.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Ya, i'd post it under anonymous also.
IBM then approached Microsoft, which already had a few of years of experience under its belt with M-DOS, BASIC, and other important tools...
Not true.
IBM was looking for an OS, which MS said, we can deliver, then they went and got QDOS and made it into MSDOS, or M-Dos, as it was put above.
In fact, you can find that in a few places:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_DOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
Now, at the time, MS had made a unix OS, but hadn't even considered (from what i can find) doing a 8086 OS until the chance came with IBM.
Sorry summaries rarely make me want to read the fucking article.
Be seeing you...
In Windows NT-based OS, for batchfile scripting (can you say "automation" &/or "logon scripts", anyone?).
* It is GOOD TO SEE that you teach it, and that others find it useful, because IF you're going to be a network tech/admin? Batchfiles still rock... even though there's PowerShell!
APK
P.S.=> I am SO very glad I came into personal computers JUST BEFORE "The Windows Craze" (which I love & is great of course), but, on DOS 3.3 thru DOS 6.22, & mainly because of learning the commandline & batch programming (especially how to use % 0-9 errlevels, "vars", + FOR loops mostly)...
... apk
Its audio was trumped by machines such as the Apple IIgs (16 channel wavetable) and the Atari ST (best MIDI software and capabilities.)
Don't know much about the Apple IIGS' audio, but it sounds interesting (no pun intended) (*)
But the Atari ST? Please. The ST became popular for music because it had MIDI ports built-in. (**) Credit to Atari for their foresight, but nothing that the Amiga couldn't do with a dirt-cheap add-on interface. The sound from an expensive synth attached to an Atari ST sounded better than the Amiga's built-in sound? No shit!
Especially ironic given the Amiga's built-in sound *was* damned impressive for the time (***), whereas the ST's own sound chip was an off-the-shelf 3-channel square-wave job dating back to the 8-bit era that was exceptionally poor in comparison.
Its graphics were again trumped by machines like the Apple IIgs (4096 simultaneous colors.)
You're showing your blatant ignorance here.
The Amiga was well-known for its 4096 colour HAM mode.. Pixel constraints limited its usefulness for animation and games, but it was impressive for static graphics.
The Apple IIGS's graphics look good, but are- as far as I can see- essentially 16-colour (320 x 200) and 4-colour (640 x 200) modes with hardware support for palette switching. The Amiga's copper co-processour could comfortably perform the same trick in its regular (non-HAM) flexible 32-colour (320 x 200) (****) and 4-colour (640 x 200) modes with the same or greater flexibility.
The nintendo had better animation capabilities than the Amiga, and they both came out the same year (1985.)
Are you seriously claiming that the original 8-bit NES was more powerful than the Amiga? Mind you, given your apparent ignorance of the Amiga's 4096 colour graphics capability, I wouldn't put too much store in your judgement on this matter.
(*) If I had time, I'd be interested in how the "wavetable" synthesis performed versus the Amiga's "real" 4-channel, 8-bit sound, but I do admit the Apple II seems like it ought to be impressive by the standards of the time.
(**) And possibly because the ST was more affordable early on, until the Amiga 500 came out and its price fell.
(***) Maybe the Apple IIGS was as well, doesn't mean they weren't both impressive.
(****) Actually, there was a "64-colour" mode, but the second 32 colours were "half-brite" versions of the first 32, so I don't really count that.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
MS-DOS was not "born" when Microsoft bought QDOS.
It was born when it first went on sale to the public.
What date was MS-DOS first publicly available? I guess its the same day the IBM PC went on sale.
Are we going to have another 30th birthday then?
In some systems of reckoning, a generation is said to be 30 years (although mostly shorter in biological terms).
So, are we ready for the second generation of MS-DOS?
(Please be neat and only puke in the designated barf bags.)
Relayman wrote :-
Sorry, I'm not responding to AC any more. It's not that hard to set up an account with a handle.
/. occasionally.
Surely it should depend on the nature of the AC post.
Does it occur to you that someone might post as AC because they are giving some inside information (like from within a company) but do not want to be identified by their boss or someone else who might recognise them from their handle? I have done this a few times myself. Posters also might want to remain AC for the more frank and open posts when discussions of girlfriends (or lack of) are involved, as happens on
Yes I know someone might be able to find out if they persisted enough (tracing network activity within your company network for example) but mostly they would not be bothered.
That he took a decent idea to such an extreme was my problem. Let's say you have a function to converte torque to horsepower
#define HP_CALC(torque, enginespeed) (torque * enginespeed / 5252)
That's a constant in a known equation, and you'd use it only once ever in your program. But he'd still want us to define the constant HP_CONVERSION_FACTOR(5252) and use that in the equation.