18 Jun
1999
18 Jun
'99
4:10 p.m.
After playing with BeOS a while something occurred to
me. Does anyone remember
at what point operating systems stopped coming with development tools? I'm
remembering the commodore 64 that came with Basic, and if you typed in the
assembler from the manual, you could (at least in theory) write proffessional
quality assembly language programs worthy of being sold to others.
Well, CP/M came with a good assembler, MS-DOS didn't. That's where
I draw the line in my head. Admittedly the version of ASM that came with
CP/M wasn't awfully featurefull, but it did work. And you got documentation
for writing programs with CP/M. And admittedly MS-DOS commonly was
installed with some version of MS-BASIC, but I (personally) don't
categorize that as a "real" development tool.
--
Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com
Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/
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