Mail Archives: opendos/2000/10/29/17:28:41
Thanks Chris. Nicely done.
Brings back alot of memories and mysteries.
Sure did like that DRDOS5-6.
Pres
At 09:27 PM 10/29/00 +0000, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>We seem to periodically run into the history of operating systems in
>this list, and it saddens me that so little is remembered. Perhaps it is
>just due to the youth of the contributors (which in itself is a good
>thing). So, although this is a bit off topic, I would like to present
>the following brief history - as it applies to the PC.
>
>In the beginning there was CP/M. Developed by Gary Kildall in 1974, it
>was based on some work he had been doing at Intel for their development
>systems (the PL/M language which ran on the Intel o/s called ISIS: I
>used it in the late 70's). CP/M was the least operating system you could
>have which would allow you to boot from an 8 inch floppy and get a
>command prompt. Kildall had also done a lot of work with DEC systems,
>and so he borrowed some ideas from them. The most obvious was "PIP"
>(Peripheral Interchange Program) which does the job everyone else calls
>COPY. Note that here is NO derivation from UNIX here, or even any
>indication that Kildall was aware of it. CP/M became hugely popular on
>all 8080 and Z80 based personal computers.
>
>Then in 1980 it all started to go wrong. The exact details are shrouded
>in the mists of time and the dust of lawyers offices, but the result was
>that IBM, unsatisfied with DR's incomplete and behind schedule CPM/86
>took up with the company that was supplying their Basic interpreter -
>Microsoft. MS purchased rights to a CP/M clone from Seattle Computer
>Products for $50,000 and re-worked it along side IBM engineers to
>produce PCDOS (the IBM version) and MS-DOS (the generic version). It is
>said the MS made nothing much out of the deal with IBM but banked on
>there being a hardware clone market to sell to - which was smart or
>lucky depending on your world view.
>
>Having entered the o/s market, MS wanted a multiuser offering as well.
>In about 1982 (I'm guessing here) they bought a UNIX system 7 license
>from Bell Labs and marketed it as Xenix. It wasn't Intel only: I used
>Xenix on a PDP-11 in 1984 or there abouts. Here in the UK Xenix was
>distributed by Logica. Before long MS decided to get out of that game
>and sold the whole thing to SCO who used it to create the x86 port that
>we all know. For many years it was practically the only x86 Unix around,
>and also had the largest installed base of any Unix flavour. So that is
>how the Microsoft copyrights turn up in Xenix code. Just to finish off
>this strand quickly, the three main species of Unix: BSD (aka SunOS),
>AT&T System V and SCO Xenix were merged together in about 1988. The open
>source movement was founded around GNU in the mid 80's and with the
>Linux kernel of the 90's provide the GNU/Linux distributions that we
>know and love. The latest is that SCO have sold off all the Unixware and
>Xenix business to Caldera Systems, so of course there is convergence
>between SCO Unix and GNU/Linux.
>
>>From 1981 onwards, MS dominated the PC o/s market. Version 1 was shipped
>with the original PC. Version 2.0 came with the XT and added a
>hierarchical file system which was inspired by Unix, but had no
>architectural similarities. It was at this point they chose the "wrong"
>sort of slash: '\' instead of '/' which bugs everyone who switches
>between both systems to this day. In 1984 came 3.0 to support the PC/AT
>and a little later v 3.1 with network support for Microsoft's feeble
>first file server. Things start to get interesting again in 1986. In
>that year I saw a system called 286DOS (or DOS286 perhaps). MS had
>worked out how to switch a 286 from protected mode back to real mode and
>so create a system that could run DOS programs as well as new protected
>mode programs. They sold it to IBM and in 1987 IBM and MS launched it
>together as OS/2. MS was never that committed to OS/2 it now turns out.
>In fact I attended a Microsoft briefing in about 1988 when they said
>quite plainly that they were going to torpedo OS/2. Which they did in
>1990 with Windows 3.0.
>
>Meanwhile, DR's operating system business declined. To compensate they
>switched emphasis to GUIs and produced GEM in 1985 ish (this is not my
>strong area so I may be out by a year or so). I remember evaluating GEM
>and Windows 1.0 in 1986 and thinking that GEM was far better. However DR
>managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory a second time when
>Apple sued them for "look and feel" similarities with the Mac (which was
>a bit of a cheek since the Mac is a complete rip off of the Xerox Star).
>DR played by the rules, changed the look and feel and lost the market.
>MS ignored the rules, won their case against Apple and took the market.
>Life is just not fair.
>
>Another episode demonstrates this. The DR operating systems group did
>not die (otherwise I would not be writing to this mail list). CP/M 86
>became more and more DOS like. Around about 1988 DR created a clone of
>MS-DOS 3.3, shipped to a small number of OEM's as DR DOS 3.31 (note no
>hyphen; that was added much later by Caldera). Successive OEM versions
>were shipped up to v 3.41. Then in 1990 DR made the innovative step of
>selling DR DOS 5.0 retail. So far as I know all previous DOS versions
>from MS, IBM and DR had been OEM only. MS were caught completely
>unawares as people dumped MS-DOS 3 and the horrendous version 4 for DR
>DOS 5.0. The motivation was basically the much improved memory
>management. It took MS a full year to respond. The MS-DOS development
>group had been disbanded and had to be re-built from scratch. However
>MS-DOS 5.0 was shipped both retail and OEM, and they began to regain
>market share. The unfair part of this story is in the OEM sector, where
>DR stood to make a killing: OEM sales are almost pure profit, whereas
>with retail you have to ship actual boxes around. MS used a series of
>very dodgy practices to block DR from this part of the market (details
>too gory to go into here). So for the third time success was snatched
>away from them.
>
>Around 1990 Microsoft started work on the other operating system they
>always wanted. They recruited the VMS development team from DEC - headed
>by Dave Cutler if I remember correctly. This was released in 1993(?) as
>"New Technology" Windows, or Windows NT. Hence NT has some similarities
>in architecture to VMS, but of course no shared code. NT has been a bit
>of a mixed blessing for MS, I think. It has forced them to duplicate a
>lot of effort maintaining two o/s strands with a lot of overlap on the
>desktop market. And still the DOS based strand refuses to die, because
>even Windows ME still has MS-DOS, and therefore a faint echo of CP/M, at
>its core.
>
>And that is as much as I am prepared to write in one go. If you managed
>to follow me this far, thank you for sticking with it. If there are any
>inaccuracies in the above please let me know.
>
>Chris.
>
>
>
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