Stupid CP/M question

D. Peschel said... | |> No, Dos works the same way as CP/M, unfortunately. | |Apparently I was unclear. No, you were clear. You missed my point. CP/M came first, then DOS. Therefore DOS worked liked CP/M, not the other way around. Your technical explanation was fine, I was just nitpicking. I refuse to give Micro$oft or Bill Gates one damned iota of glory after all they stole from others. |Yes, it should have. And the more MS waited to improve DOS (because there |was no incentive since they already had a monopoly, or because they were |sloppy programmers, or for backward-compatibility reasons) the more |excruciating the thought of improvements which would break old programs DEC pulled it off with VMS. The people who had to have the old compatibility just kept running the old hardware and software, and everyone else moved forwards. And right happy about it most of us were. We ended up with an awesome development system that did OK for realtime (VAX/VMS) and an awesome realtime system that still needed better developer tools (PDP/whatever) 8^) |became. If they had just ripped off a better OS, that might have been nice |as well. Something with long file names, or multitasking, or whatever. |And OSs of the time DID have long file names. I don't know about |multitasking (maybe OS/9 or FLEX were around when DOS was born?). VMS was at least in the works, and UNIX was around in some forms. There was precedent. But the guy hacking DOS was just messing around, trying to do a slightly better CP/M (as was Digital Research, who GAVE AWAY the whole stinking computer world to Bill Gates on a silver platter, with a military escort, and a ticker tape parade. For crying out loud, the first versions of UNIX ran on minis that didn't have any more memory space than micros. (OK, so they had 16 bit processors, I know. So did the PC! Sort of...) Not that I'm bitter, you understand. 8^) -Miles