On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:
Do recall that QDOS was a straightforward CP/M clone
and that MS-DOS
to at least version 3.0 _documented_ the CP/M compatible system calls
in the OS they'd bought. CP/M didn't fizzle.
I remember the CP/M compatible system calls, but I don't remember any
software that used them (perhaps early WordStar?). The thing that allowed
the PC to take off was software that consistently bypassed both DOS and
the BIOS. That's why every system after the PC had to be PC-compatible,
not just MS-DOS compatible, and certainly not CP/M compatible.
When you use a DOS interface under NT, the command
switch character is
that which MS-DOS took from CP/M and Kildall took from DEC.
To this day, I still suffer from the choice of '/' as a command switch,
'\' as a directory separator, and CR/LF as a line terminator. Luckily, ^Z
stopped being a problem when new DOS system calls were introduced (IIRC).
-- Doug