The Origins of DOS

On Sat, 2006-10-28 at 19:00 +0100, Stan Barr wrote: Indeed! My first professional consulting was with a physician in Hawaii, where I lived at the time. I would go over to his house on his days off (always weekdays) and swim in his pool and discuss computers. He picked my brain quite a bit, but it was far and away the most pleasant working conditions I've EVER had. Oddly enough, he got all my input on the subject, and totally ignored it, after paying me about a grand, total. (This was pre-Carter, so a grand was REAL money.) He skipped CP/M, (which I was backing) and got a Radio Shack, with optional diskette drives. He also got one of those weird printers that burnt a silver layer off of black paper to make a mark. By the time he paid for that he had paid more than a CP/M system would have cost, and did not have the expandability. I asked him, as diplomatically as possible, why he had bought a system that would do less, for more money, from RS. His response was that he was greatly comforted by the superior warranty that the RS had. That was a good point... except that he, on the same day, gave me a kit he had purchased, which included a ROM and some support chips, to hack onto his motherboard so that he could have lower case letters. I pointed out that doing that would void his warranty, and was told to go ahead anyway. *SIGH* After about a year, he totaled up what he had spent on his computer, and pointed out to me that he had spent about twice what a CP/M system would have cost him for the same functionality. He also asked me if there was a way to run CP/M on his RS machine, as all the business software he saw was written for CP/M, and most of it did not have RS versions. I bit my tongue until it bled, literally. I just thought I'd pass this on, as it combines your comments on hand-holding with the recent RS thread... </ramble mode> Peace, Warren E. Wolfe wizard at voyager.net