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

[Mike Hicks <hick0088@tc.umn.edu>]

Philip C Mendelsohn wrote:
> 
> [IBM] 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.

Yes, well, I know about that..  ``Triumph of the Nerds'' was a pretty
good PBS series about a lot of this stuff, though very heavily IBM/Mac
dependent.

Anyway I was mostly just curious about the multitasking and possible
protected memory functions and when they got in there..   Was CP/M a
multitasking OS way back when the PC was being developed?  From what
I've read, it seems that stuff came up in the mid-1980's (probably as
the 286 was gaining popularity).  It also sounds like the system was
designed much more intelligently than DOS -- the kernel actually knew
how to handle serial ports and apparently had a terminal subsystem that
quite similar to the way Unix handles things.  Of course, it appears
that CP/M had a head start of several years on (Q)DOS.  Incidentally,
the version of QDOS that Microsoft bought was apparently named 0.10...

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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088@tc.umn.edu ]