OT: Programming in C
Bill Davidsen
davidsen at tmr.com
Sun Apr 27 23:17:16 UTC 2008
g wrote:
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> Bill Davidsen wrote:
>> Heard of it, had a friend who was a big DRDOS user, you missed me asking
>> him by a few months, he just died.
>
> my condolences on lost of your friend.
>
> drdos, do not recall which version, but it was just before msbsdos, had a
> a 3 key combo that when entered, it would display os version.
>
> bg disassembled drdos, made changes and repackaged it and released it as
> 'his' msdos version of cp/m.
>
> a user of drdos bought a copy and while using it, noted that there was a lot
> of similarity to drdos. out of curiosity, he pressed the 3 key combo and up
> popped 'drdos ver. x.xx' (do not recall version), after which he contacted
> digital research and informed them.
>
> being that digital research's owner was friends with bg, he told bg that he
> was a bad boy and that if he would make changes, they would not sue him, so
> bg made changes and released a new version. rest is history and a loss of
> digital research.
>
I confess I don't recall hearing about msbsdos, even though I was
tracking much of that stuff at the time, since I was doing both hardware
and software evaluations. But there are a lot of odd stories which are
true, so anything is possible.
For instance, I used to use S100 computers for industrial control, both
8085, Z80, and 8088 (from Seattle Computers). Seattle Computers came out
with a 16 bit board for S100, and needed software for it, so they had
one of their software guys sit down and write a CP/M clone from scratch,
called QDOS (quick and dirty OS). Microsoft bought the rights to that
for cheap (as reported in various articles of the day) and called it
MSDOS...
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
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