new to Fedora - QDOS

[Jim Cornette]

James Wilkinson wrote:
> 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.
> 

Thanks for the link. I guess not remembering those versions is probably 
for the best.

I seem to remember various IBM DOS versions. A few DOS 3.x, no 4.x, 5, 
6.0 then 6.22.

Then the disappearance of pctools and stacker from mainstream view.

Jim