Re: [TCLUG:17392] [OT] Some computing history?

[Philip C Mendelsohn <mend0070@tc.umn.edu>]

There's lot's more to the story than that.

Digital Equipment had a machine that was much nicer than the PC, but they
decided to build it in house to their usual rigorous specs while IBM
decided to outsource as much as possible to make it to market first.  Of
course, this is what opened the PC up to clones, and IBM eventually lost
their advantage (karma in action?)

The DEC machine ran CP/M-86, licensed from Digital Research.  When IBM
tried to get it, legend has it that the head honcho at DR wouldn't speak
to them.

They ended up looking for someone who could supply a CP/M knockoff (which
was already fairly UNIX influenced) and ended up talking to Microsoft, who
bought out another CP/M (I forget which) and cobbled it together and you
know the rest.

But, to make things more interesting, did you know that when Bill Gates
was first starting MS, they couldn't find anyone who wanted to put
anything into the venture, so he ended up just riding on his Dad's (a very
wealthy and powerful man) coattails.  Bill G. doesn't really even deserve
much credit for starting his own company -- he couldn't have done it
without daddy.

And, I suspect that big "friendly" forces were at work in the software
contract, because why else would IBM, the biggest and oldest computing
company in the world at the time, go to some little cheeseball company
whose business wasn't writing operating systems, but trying to sell the
world a stupid little BASIC interpreter when they needed a little single
user OS?

Well, this is about the point in recalling computing history that I give
up, because if it weren't for Ken Olsen and Digital, no one else would
have bothered to challenge the conventional notion that batch processing,
punch cards, and system operators were the best way for a user to interact
with a computer -- i.e., not at all!  Digital, CP/M, DR, Cray, ...
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."  And some fine
engineering scattered along the verge, too!

Phil M

On Mon, 8 May 2000, Mike Hicks wrote:

> I found out several years too late that Digital Research's DR-DOS had
> preemptive multitasking and other nice features like the ability to
> handle protected-mode execution of programs.  How long did it have
> that?  I even used DR-DOS for a while, and I didn't know it was able to
> do that (jeez, I came from the world of MS-DOS, where everything sucked
> ;-p )  I read all this stuff about DR-DOS and CP/M and I just get more
> and more annoyed..  Oh well, Microsoft apparently took the cost of CP/M
> and divided by 10 when they decided to sell MS-DOS.  Just curious,
> though I'm somewhat afraid to be `enlightened' on this topic..
> 
> 

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