On 2024-07-29 10:09 p.m., Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Mon, 29 Jul 2024, Rod Bartlett wrote:
I found Tim Peterson's old blog a while back
which contained some
interesting tidbits about the history of DOS from the original author.
http://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/
I did find one unimportant error,
He said that DOS 1.10 supported both double sided, and 9 sectors per track.
That may have been what he wished for, but I'm pretty sure that what
Microsoft actually released was DOS 1.10/1.25 supported double sided 8
sectors per track (up from single sided in DOS 1.00),
(SOME OEM versions of 1.25 support 8" disks!)
and DOS 2.00 supported 9 sectors per track (Plus enormous other major
changes, such as the "file handle" API, added to the existing "FCB"
API.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
2.0 was better but not quite a finished product.
Xenix...
It planned over time to improve MS-DOS so it would be almost
indistinguishable from single-user Xenix, or XEDOS, which would also run
on the 68000, Z8000, and LSI-11; they would be upwardly compatible with
Xenix, which Byte in 1983 described as "the multi-user MS-DOS of the
future". Microsoft's Chris Larson described MS-DOS 2.0's Xenix
compatibility as "the second most important feature".] His company
advertised DOS and Xenix together, describing MS-DOS 2.0 (its
"single-user OS") as sharing features and system calls with Xenix ("the
multi-user, multi-tasking, Unix-derived operating system"), and
promising easy porting between them.