new to Fedora
James Wilkinson
james at westexe.demon.co.uk
Tue Aug 17 12:37:07 UTC 2004
Chris Jones wrote:
> I seem to remember back in the mists of time long lost that DOS 1.1 was
> actually using very similar commands to unix (notably cd, mkdir, but
> _not_ more or ls, for some reason best known to a certain W Gates who
> apparently jointly wrote PC-DOS as it was then called).
Jim Cornette replied:
> I don't remember that farback in versions of DOS. The story that I heard
> was that he bought the OS off of some other individual or small company.
> (Dirty DOS or something) Then sold the OS bought for a small fraction,
> then sold it to IBM. Then IBM cleaned out a slew of bugs.
Well, I don't remember that far back personally, either. But Eric
Raymond claims it was Tim Paterson who wrote Quick and Dirty OS in six
weeks at http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/MS-DOS.html, which bears
out what I've heard elsewhere.
Dos 1 never had subdirectories: that came in DOS 2. DOS 2 was intended,
back in those dim distant days, to be a migration path to Xenix, a
rather awful port of Unix to run on the PCs of those days. So that's
where the Unix-a-like syntax came from. (The PC market didn't want to
migrate, unless they could run all their existing programs as well as
they could on DOS. This started a trend that has been the Curse of the
Computer Industry for the next twenty-odd years).
I don't think IBM got seriously into DOS code until around DOS 4, when
it was obvious that it was going to be a major IBM product line.
James.
--
E-mail address: james | "The US Air Force is removing harmful "greenhouse"
@westexe.demon.co.uk | gases from the cooling systems of intercontinental
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| -- The Guardian.
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