Sellam Ismail says: I disagree with his attempt to draw some of those parallels though between CP/M and Linux. It fails to take in to account the time period in history and the market then vs. now. Hardware was in a much different transition period than it is now, with micros still just moving forward to being accepted as serious business at the time. The market was still majorly a hardware driven market. The PC was IBM's second micro, and at the time IBM was still in a major position from it's mainframe and mini clout to lead business's like the pied piper to the hardware direction it wanted. Gates and company were smart enough to latch on, and the move catapulted MS-DOS to the forefront. They (as has been written about ad nauseum) were also smart enough to realize software was the future, and planned ahead to catapult themselves past IBM in to the dominance they soon enjoyed and still do. That environment where they came to prominance simply does not exist now. He draws another incorrect parallel with multiple flavors of CP/M being a problem vs. the multiple customized Linux's. I'm sorry, but in the 70's and early 80's micro market you simply had a lot of of different architectures and platforms (many with propietary cards/configurations/etc) that needed the customization of and the support of that manufacturer. Not all graphics, sound, memory, etc. cards/chips/whatever provided the same basic defined level of support, had the same level of OS integration/supoort, etc. etc. since again the hardware was in it's infancy. Today, short of embedded pc systems (which as far as I know Microsoft does not dominate), you do not have anwhere near that ammount of customized/proprietary pc architectures/platforms. It's pretty standardized now between open architecture PowerPC and X86 platforms in the micro market, with most of the onus of support falling on a symbiotic relationship between third party card/chip manufacturers and the OS company since much of the need for guess work/customization/etc. for the basic motherboard/bus/etc. itself has been gotten rid of. Unlike MS-DOS and Windows, Linux is truly a product of the Internet to begin with - being one of the first major OS's to be built through that kind of world wide networked collaboration that it has come to enjoy. That includes continued driver support, kernel, etc. that has lead to Linux being ported to many many different platforms from older hardware, to all the different micro formats, embedded systems, and even video game consoles. The various "flavors" of Linux (specifically in the pc distriputions of Red Hat, Calderra, etc. etc.) have little to do now with the hardware/disk/etc. issues that CP/M faced and have more to do with software incompatibilites due to enhancements each distributor has decided to tinker with in an effort to dress up the same standard Linux distribution that's available to everyone. After all, the kernel and related OS is free so you have to try and "dress" it up if you want people to have a reason to buy a distribution of it from you. The bottom line of all the above being in the 70's and early 80's, many many platforms = bad. CP/M must be customized to support many many platforms/disk formats/HW configurations = bad, and it's licensing practices leads to many different flavors. Microsoft used IBM (by also pushing for an open platform and a non-OS based BIOS that they would not have to worry about protecting - that's IBM's problem) to push for standardization and thin the herd. And set itself in position to retain control of any and all future "flavors" of it's OS through it's licensing and development practices. Now, over 20 years later the herd is down to a few standardized cattle. Microsoft Windows completely dominates one of them. Now you have Linux, where customization = good, and allows you to run on all the cattle and any future calfs, while taking advantage of the same software driven/third party symbiotic relationship that Microsoft enjoys because of the now standardized open arctiecture environment that the micro platforms have. But hey, I'm a FreeBSD guy and I thought BeOS had a great shot if they wouldn't have been so bone headed about the drivers. So what do I care? ;) Marty

When I started in the micro world in 1984, my first system was a Japanese Sord system, called S-343. It was a dual-floppy system, running MS-DOS 3.21. This was a specially adapted version, where the 360k floppies were accessible by other MS systems, but the 1.2M floppies were not. I dont know why, though. Nico