[cctalk] Re: Classic computing - earliest years

On Wed, 15 Oct 2025, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote: "DOS"??!? Every operating system called itself "DOS" from 360 through micros. When IBM MS-DOS/PC-DOS achieved dominance, the generala public started calling MS-DOS/PC-DOS, "DOS" IBM explicitly considered "DOS"/"Disk Operating System" to be a description, NOT A NAME! IBM did not trademark "DOS", nor even "PC-DOS"! MicroSoft, however, did trademark "MS-DOS" In 1987, while on family business in Washington, DC, (my father's death), I went to the patent and trademark office to research trademarking "XenoSoft" UCSD had already trademarked "XenoFile" (did they ever actually ship that?) I also confirmed that "DOS", "PC-DOS" were not trademarked, bu MS-DOS was. IB_Irrelecant: three weeks later, at the curriculum committee meeting, one xxxxxxx said that I could not call my OS Class "Microcomputer disk Operating Systems", because "DOS" and "Disk Operating system" are REGISTERED TRADEMARKS OF IBM"!!! I still had my stack pass from PTO in my pocket! Soon after, I managed to get on the curriculum committee to defend our department from Like you apparently do, I consider those three (TRS80, AppleII, and Commodore PET) to have been tied. first announcement, first prototype, first [trade show] exhibit, first taking orders, first delivered, first available without pre-order, etc. are all importaant, but intermingled enough that by picking one of tose as being "what's important", anybody could argue any one of the three as being first. But, it behooves us to explicitly mention August 11, 1981 with the release of the 5150 "PC". That may have been the title of the article that PCWorld did (they called XenoCopy, "the acid test", because (at the insitence of the publisher, that first release version of Xenocopy DRLIBERATELY refused to run on anything but "real" 5150 (trivail look at some ROM addresses) https://classiccmp.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/cctalk@classiccmp.org/messa… -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com > The era > of old computers saw one generation building on the shoulders of giants who > designed these wayback computers(with apologies to Wayback Machine). > Today’s PCs and ARM machines are just the latest iteration of this > theory(by the way not mine). > > Happy computing > > Murray 🙂