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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."
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
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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.
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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?
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C:\OFFLAWN.COM
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I teach a 1 credit DOS class at my local community college, and have had a number of students tell me the batch file stuff they learn has been useful in their jobs.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I'm an Amiga bigot from waaaay back, too. (My first computer as an adult was an Amiga 1000, or just an Amiga when it was originally sold.).
But as a former frontline flamewarrior, I have to say: It's time to come out of the jungle. We lost that war. Yes, our chosen computer was vastly superior in every way. The difference was that Commodore couldn't sell T-bone steak and potato chips to starving people. Commmodore-brand sushi would be marketed under the tagline "The best cold, dead raw fish you've ever had!".
Superior marketing always wins. That's the lesson here, Amiga Persecution Complex notwithstanding.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
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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.
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.
Yeah all this cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing is terrible for users. We really lost.
Go ahead and predict the past future if things were the way you wanted them if you must, but that's a bankrupt exercise in wish fulfillment.
The summary is technically incorrect. Near the end it states that Microsoft had years under its belt with MS-DOS and Basic. The mistake in the summary is that they had years of experience with MS-DOS--that didn't even exist as a product at the time.
It had years under its belt with Basic which was written initially by stealing Harvard computing power (Paul Allen wasn't a student and Gates was just a deadbeat about his classes, none of which at the time were computer related). And the language itself was a rip off of the language invented by two other professors from a different school.
Years earlier, as kids, Gates and Allen both had been in trouble with the law for hacking and stealing time-share minutes. Back then those were significant costs to anyone using them. Instead of being prosecuted they were hired to test for faults and weaknesses in security.
It was Allen who knew of the SCP QDOS. Gates essentially lied to IBM knowing that he could gain control of QDOS. In Microsoft taking over QDOS, SCP retained rights to any and all changes made by Microsoft, and were owed royalties. Microsoft failed to pay those and SCP owner who was going bankrupt sued Microsoft and won. He paid his debts and had a little left for retirement. MS-DOS wasn't created till after IBM-DOS had been out for some time.
So, they stole computing time from private companies and were forgiven for being so brilliant. Then later they were to steal computing time again, knowing it was illegal, from Harvard, to write an emulator for the 8086 instruction set so they could write their version of Basic which was stolen from two professors from another major university. They then used that to make a company (pirates benefiting commercially from their theft), and in the process Gates tried to screw Allen by, during his convalescence where he nearly died, by getting Ballmer to connive to gain control of his stock. And, during the negotiation process of deciding how to split the shares upon creation of the new business, Gates decried Allen because he'd become an employee of MITS and thus apparently deserved fewer shares, when after then agreement about the split, a few weeks (months) later, Gates was also an employee of MITS. Then, Gates and Allen had the gall to write open letters to others about stealing software. The reality is, that Gates and Allen had stolen considerable sums by then.
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For a while there, I kept my .bat files in c:\belfry.
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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.
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Hi,
/P to page it).
Speaking as an "old fart", I can say that, while this is funny, you obviously aren't an old-school DOS user.
If you were typing that from a DOS prompt on an old PC, you'd enter it as:
\offlawn
Few people had more than one hard drive back then, so your default drive would be C:, eliminating the need to specify the drive letter. Then, you'd leverage DOS' internal processing of commands: It would look for internal commands first, then look for external commands. When extensions weren't specified, it would look for executables as follows: COM first, then EXE and then BAT.
Since OFFLAWN.COM apparently exists in your example, you'd save typing another four characters just by knowing this.
Now, with regards to the location of OFFLAWN.COM? Nobody I knew would ever fill up the root of C: with files - there was a limit to the number of files and directories that could exist in the root, after all, and if you reached it, you'd get an out of space error once you tried to create another.
In addition, given the fact that a standard DOS screen was 80 by 25, you'd want to limit a DIR display, so as to avoid having to pipe the output (later, use
The approach that I used was this: The root of C: was limited to COMMAND.COM, AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, the hidden system files, and subdirectories (what you young folk call "folders" these days) in which you'd store programs and data.
Since there were also limitations on the length of the path, I'd make the names of subdirectories that I wanted included in it short, too.
My usual approach ended up in a path similar to this:
C:\BAT;C:\BIN;C:\DOS;
BAT contained my batch files. BIN contained DOS utilities that enhanced or replaced similar DOS commands and DOS contained DOS, of course.
Doing this kept the path small, reduced the time to search it, and also ensured that DOS would search for executables the way that *I* wanted it to.
I wrote BAT files to start all of my programs, you see, and so putting them all in C:\BAT would ensure that they would be found and run first. Most were simple: Change to the directory where the program was installed, run it, and then return to the root of C: once it exited.
Since this path leveraged the way DOS processed commands running WordStar from a command line was as easy as typing ws from anywhere and pressing enter, without having to actually have the directory where WS.COM resided in the path, nor having to be in a specific subdirectory in order to avoid the dreaded "Bad command or filename".
Finally, given the organization I just explained, OFFLAWN.COM would be in C:\BIN, and so, all you'd need to do to run it would be type: offlawn (DOS converted all input to uppercase, after all, so why waste time pressing the Shift key?).
And so I close by saying this:
offlawn
*grin*
Regards,
dj