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DOS seems to have been the minimal effort choice of "It's like CP/M enough our users will be familiar with it" without actually considering those users. Now to
by leeter 5y ago
DOS seems to have been the minimal effort choice of "It's like CP/M enough our users will be familiar with it" without actually considering those users. Now to be fair in 1981 that was "state of the art". The Xerox Alto was something that was way beyond reach for most people and GEOS (8 or 16bit) wasn't going to exist for another 5 years. But it was a marginal improvement over CP/M, which is about as much as one can say about it.
Modern UEFI is probably the best parallel, both in that it only really deals with text and some graphics (bitmaps only) and doesn't have any standardized interface for sound/3d.
- ghaff 5y agoThere were better 16-bit OSs in the minicomputer world at the time but they were all priced and developed for a very different world. It would have been interesting if something like RDOS (Data General) had taken off in the PC world but that world was just so price-conscious in comparison. Heck, the 8088 was chosen over the 8086 mostly just to have a smaller data bus.
- p_l 5y agoInterestingly enough, UEFI ships with UI toolkit. This can be partially customized by vendor, but essentially the idea is that for many simpler utilities and config panels, you can don't have to worry about details and just use a basic UI framework which will be handled into VT-UTF8 or GUI as needed.