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CP/M and UCSD-Pascal, two operating systems available for the IBM PC besides DOS, had already been sold to individual users for many years. Microsoft itself la
by jecel 6y ago
CP/M and UCSD-Pascal, two operating systems available for the IBM PC besides DOS, had already been sold to individual users for many years.
Microsoft itself launched Xenix a year before the PC (August 1980).
- prepend 6y agoI think like pretty much all of Microsoft, they didn’t innovate by doing it first, they innovated by popularizing it. I can’t find sales of CP/M and UCSD-Pascal, but I imagine they aren’t what Microsoft started generating from their OS.
- jecel 6y agoA Byte magazine editorial praised the newly launched PC as being the "Rosetta Stone" of computing for offering such a choice in operating systems. In practice, with PC-DOS being 5 times cheaper than the other two it was a standard from the start. I mostly used QNX with PCs myself until Linux came along. So though it took a long time, PCs did eventually run nearly all known OSes.
- dboreham 6y ago"History" is always horribly wrong as written, if you were there at the time, I suspect. Add OS/9 and Flex to the list. There were countless others.
- lproven 6y agoThat's OS-9, with a hyphen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9 Not to be confused with the IBM family of OSes with a slash, notably OS/2 but also including OS/390 and OS/400.