4 ms·
Ahh, an OS which never had vendor lock-in, and had multiple independent vendors. That dream died with Windows.
by dispose13432 10y ago
Ahh, an OS which never had vendor lock-in, and had multiple independent vendors.
That dream died with Windows.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago>"multiple independent vendors" Unless I'm missing something, there weren't multiple vendors for MS-DOS pre-Windows.
- Sanddancer 10y agoThere was MS-DOS, and also Digital Research, later Novell, then Caldera, etc DOS which tended to have features that wouldn't be around until a version or two of MS DOS later. There were also nasty power plays involving the two -- early betas of Windows 3.1 would refuse to run on DR-DOS.
- wenc 10y agoThere was also IBM PC DOS, which was essentially a rebranded MS-DOS but later diverged into its own thing, with support for REXX scripting, etc.
- zzalpha 10y agoDon't forget 4DOS. I loved that OS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS
- dguaraglia 10y agoActually, I looked that up because that's what I remembered using as a "DOS alternative". Seems like it was actually just a shell replacement, leaving the actual OS stuff (such as handling INT 21h requests) to the underlaying OS, whether DOS, Windows or OS/2. I guess wee me back in the day didn't know the difference :)
- zzalpha 10y agoWell son of a gun. I assumed it was a full DOS implementation but you're right. Well TIL... 20 years later...
- int_19h 10y agoAnd PTS-DOS
- vegabook 10y agoIBM PCs came with PC DOS which you could also buy separately, which was an (essentially identical) licensed version of MS DOS. It was vendor independent, though.
- drivers99 10y agoIBM PCs had BASIC built into the ROM (licensed from Microsoft). BASIC.COM and BASICA.COM (advanced BASIC) which came with PC-DOS would call subroutines in the ROM (except for ones that had errata), so you needed a real IBM PC to run it. Clones didn't have BASIC in ROM, so MS-DOS came with GWBASIC.COM which included all the subroutines. Turns out GWBASIC runs faster than BASICA because the RAM had faster access than ROM. More details at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC