11 ms·

CP/M was the popular operating system that IBM wanted to license for their skunkworks Personal Computer project. But the founder of Digital Research, the compan

by pavlov 4y ago

CP/M was the popular operating system that IBM wanted to license for their skunkworks Personal Computer project. But the founder of Digital Research, the company that developed CP/M, was more interested that day in going flying his plane than meeting with corporate men in navy suits. (This may be apocryphal.) IBM turned instead to their second choice, a small company that was supplying BASIC interpreters to many 8-bit micros. The company didn’t actually have a suitable disk operating system product, but the founder knew someone who did. He made a deal to license the source code for a fixed fee and no limitations on redistribution. And that’s how Bill Gates acquired MS-DOS for $50k.

Neil44 4y ago
CP/M was nice, it's a shame we got saddled with MS-DOS for decades.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Having started my MS-DOS path with version 3.3, and used all MS-DOS versions, also the DR-DOS 5.0 and 6.0 versions, experienced CP/M on the Spectrum +3A, I fail to see how CP/M was better.
  - mongol 4y ago
    Which directory separator did it have?
    - Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
      CP/M didn't have sub-directories, though it did have 16 "user areas" on a disk.
      - II2II 4y ago
        MS-DOS did not have directories at first either. It was a feature in version 2.0, when hard drive support was added. Directories seem to have been a foreign concept among early home computer operating systems and I suspect its adoption was driven by the adoption of hard drives. For example, the Apple II did not gain directory support until ProDOS was introduced and the Macintosh only gained folders with the introduction of HFS. I don't recall directories existing for the Commodore 64 either.
        jasomill 4y ago
        Technically, the original Macintosh filesystem supported folders as "an illusion maintained by the system software"[1] in spite of its flat directory structure. [1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/mac/Files/Files-85.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...
        egypturnash 4y ago
        Directories just weren’t worth it on discs that stored less than 200k. You organized stuff by putting the floppies in the right place in their storage boxes.
      - aidos 4y ago
        Oooo, question for those that might know a little more about this. I had an Amstrad (CPC6128 running CP/M) and I found that if I did cat to list disk contents without a disk in the drive enough times in a row it would eventually list out really random contents. Anyone know what might have been going on.
        Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
        CAT would have been AMSDOS, not CP/M (it was DIR in CP/M). Not sure what was happening in that case though - it sounds like a bug, but not one I ever recall encountering!
        aidos 4y ago
        Oh interesting. I swear it was cp/m; cat I’m more hazy on (though I feel like I didn’t use dir until ibm dos). I had to really hammer on the command, and it would actually be trying to read either the hardware. I wonder if it was actually a physical issue that triggered it.
        atq2119 4y ago
        Sounds like whatever check that was used to determine whether a floppy was present or not had some small probability of giving a false positive. Maybe because without a floppy, the head would read random data that could pass some integrity check by chance.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      The same as always \, while CP/M didn't even had directories, it was a flat file systems.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      I believe CP/M always used the forward slash as the CLI modifier argument prefix (where Unix would use a dash). MS-DOS inherited this. When directories were eventually added, the forward slash couldn’t be used as a separator because it was already used for modifiers.
      - ratboy666 4y ago
        CP/M does not use forward slash as the CLI modifier. Examples - from the standard CP/M utilities (CP/M 2.2) ASM FILE.ABC .ABC encodes options. Source file for ASM is always .ASM STAT uses $ - STAT FILE $R/O sets file to read-only PIP A:=B:[G0] - PIP (copy, "peripheral interchange program"), uses [ for options, as do later Digital Research programs (like the linker). Basically /no/ Digital Research use of / as option separator. Microsoft used / - for example the command line L80 FILE,FILE/N/E - which means link FILE.REL (relocatable), naming the output FILE.COM, and link and exit. CP/M 2.2 introduced "user areas" - a disk could be divided into 16 user areas (USER 0 to USER 15). There was no "searching" until CP/M 3. CP/NET (Digital Research networking) used [ as a separator. Examples (from CP/NET documentation) A>RMAC SNIOS A>LINK SNIOS[OS] LOGIN {password}{[mstrID]} LOGIN secret[01] would log in to server 01, with password secret NETWORK B:=D:[F] assigned B: to server 0F, drive D: The lack of directories was not such a loss, as the maximum disk size for CP/M 2.2 was 8MB. Remote drives with CP/NET could be much larger (I have used up to 1TB).
      - WorldMaker 4y ago
        Forward slash as a modifier prefix was IBM's desire because it was what they used in Mainframe OSes at the time. A lot of MS-DOS things were for "compatibility" with IBM Mainframes at the time. Supposedly, Microsoft was lightly against the forward slash as command argument because they preferred Unix machines at that point as development mainframes and liked the POSIX defaults for forward slash as directory separator. (Which is why MS-DOS even from the early days of the file system often supported both for directory slash in first party commands, even if individual app argument parsers from third parties did not.)
        skissane 4y ago
        > Forward slash as a modifier prefix was IBM's desire because it was what they used in Mainframe OSes at the time. A lot of MS-DOS things were for "compatibility" with IBM Mainframes at the time Not true. On IBM mainframes, options are generally specified in a NAME=VALUE or NAME(VALUE) format. For example, here is a TSO command to allocate a dataset: ALLOCATE DATASET(ALLOC.FILE1) NEW DIR(4) TRACKS SPACE(2,3) DSORG(PO) RECFM(F) LRECL(80) BLKSIZE(800) CATALOG VM/CMS uses an open parenthesis to introduce options instead, for example: LISTFILE (LABEL The forward slash option style does not come from IBM mainframes. Nor (despite what many people think) does it come from CP/M – CP/M's own option style was to put options in square brackets: PIP B:=A:*.COM [G9 V] Not sure exactly where CP/M gets that from, but may be very vaguely inspired by IBM mainframe conventions (especially VM/CMS), with square brackets replacing parentheses for whatever reason, and using single characters to save memory and typing. What I actually believe happened: forward slash comes from DEC via Microsoft. Microsoft's development tools for CP/M used that option style, which Microsoft got from DEC, because they didn't like CP/M's native option style. QDOS/PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1.0 copied that Microsoft option style. Yes, IBM did tell Microsoft not to change it from / to - between PC-DOS 1.0 and PC-DOS 2.0. But that was simply because IBM cared more about backward compatibility between DOS 1.0 and DOS 2.0 than Microsoft themselves did. It was nothing to do with mainframes. The only thing about DOS which shows any strong direct IBM influence, in terms of actual syntax/terminology/concepts/etc, is code pages.
    - mananaysiempre 4y ago
      Note that the OEM README[1] for MS-DOS 2 (the first version with a hierarchical filesystem) suggests that it was at IBM’s insistence that MS-DOS used backslash for directories and slash for options, rather than slash for directories and hyphen-minus for options (even though Microsoft’s own programs for CP/M apparently used slash for options due to DEC influences, instead of the brackets used by CP/M itself[2], so this is a bit of a tangle). The documentation and examples for CONFIG.SYS[3] also bear an evident Unix influence, note in particular AVAILDEV and SWITCHAR. The MS-DOS-specific calls for file descriptors (as opposed to CP/M-compatible calls for FCBs) are called “XENIX file calls” in the source[4]. (All DOS system calls for files accepted either separator, but the option parsers would retrieve SWITCHAR[5] and give it precedence.) [1] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/README.txt https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30510935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30510935 [3] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/CONFIG.txt https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/... [4] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/XENIX.ASM https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/... [5] http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-2752.htm http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-2752.htm
      - kiwidrew 4y ago
        Yep, there was a (brief) period of time -- before MS-DOS became wildly popular -- when Microsoft was pitching Xenix as the future operating system for the PC. (Also worth noting is that MS-DOS 2.0 was a nearly complete rewrite of the 1.x codebase...)
      - lproven 4y ago
        > it was at IBM’s insistence that MS-DOS used backslash for directories and slash for options I think this is a misinterpretation. See the footnote in this article: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-backslash-as-path-separator/ http://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-back... Look at the positions of `\` and `/` on this keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_F_keyboard#/media/File:IBM_Model_F_XT.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_F_keyboard#/media/File:I... Both were easy-to-type characters on US-layout keyboards, not requiring shift or any other control key.
    - lproven 4y ago
      I am not sure if you are being facetious or not. CP/M did not support subdirectories, so it did not have a directory separator. Its design was derived from a multiuser minicomputer OS (or several of them, principally DEC OS-8) and so it had user areas instead: A1: B6: C3: http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/cpm/cpm_cookbook_user.htm http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/cpm/cpm_cookbook_user....
      - mongol 4y ago
        I am not facetious. I wonder how things would have turned out if CP/M "won".
        lproven 4y ago
        OK, fair enough. I suppose it's fairly natural to assume from the POV of the 3rd decade of the 21st century that computers from 50 years ago had basic facilities like hierarchical directories... but not all of them did. Big ones like high-end minicomputers did. I learned on VAX/VMS at university in the 1980s, and it did. Cheap low-end minis didn't, and nor did the early 8-bit machines whose design was inspired by low-end minicomputers. The main influences on CP/M were DEC OSes: OS/8 and TOPS-10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPS-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPS-10 The 2nd is mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M#Early_history I have never used either -- I'm not that old -- and I am not sure but I don't think either supported hierarchical subdirectories. The closest thing that evolved into something that did was the DEC OS RSX-11, which influenced VMS. They used a filesystem called DEC Files-11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files-11 So that did end up supporting hierachical directories, but there isn't a "directory separator" per se. That's a UNIX-ism that MS-DOS 2.0 copied. A VMS file in its folder might have been called something like: VAXA$DKA100::[USERS.LPROVEN.SOURCE.FORTRAN]WUMPUS.FOR;42 In other words, devices had multicharacter names that had meaning (e.g. what type of controller board, then which controller, then which disk), possibly after a cluster node name, then in square brackets a folder path separated by dots, then a filename, then another dot, then a 3-letter extension, then a semicolon, then a version number. Looks baroque compared to the dead simple UNIX name style... /home/lproven/source/fortran/wumpus Every time you save a file, the version number increments automatically. And path specs combined with device names and cluster names mean that the filename could point to another disk on this controller, or another disk on a different controller, or a disk on another node in the cluster, or a disk on any node in a named cluster. You can't do that so easily with the Unix naming system. So the sysadmin has to mount folders from other machines into this one's filesystem, and that means also setting up some kind of distributed authentication like NIS or YP or LDAP, and then some PAM modules or something... and it all gets very complicated. In other words, the simplicity of the UNIX design doesn't take complexity away: it just hides it. It's still there but it becomes someone else's problem. Whereas the DEC way of doing things sort of puts the complexity right there in front of you, but in return, you got rich facilities right there. Much less need for Git when files are versioned and you can go back to an older version before you broke something just using info encoded into the filename. Much less need for NFS mounts when the filesystem knows about controllers and networking and clusters and lets you address them. Much less need for bolted-on fancy authentication when that's built into the OS because the designers thought about stuff like networks, clusters, and authentication, when all that got taken _out_ of UNIX and then had to be bolted back on later. So, yeah, the UNIX way is simpler, but OTOH that also means it's poorer. Poorer as in less rich. As in the DEC system was richer: being richer lets you do more. CP/M evolved into multitasking multiuser OSes in time, but DR didn't get to re-invent all this stuff. Maybe if DOS had never happened, DR would have prospered and bought DEC instead of Compaq buying DEC, and this stuff would have made it into PC OSes. Who knows...
  - Neil44 4y ago
    To be fair I was thinking about the way MS-DOS solved problems that came along later like having lots more RAM and larger file systems. 640k, expanded memory, extended memory, file size limits. Things that I don't think CP/M was developed long enough to have to solve, so maybe it's not really fair to compare the two.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      It would have probably ended up in similar mess with some different trade-offs and design decisions. Not in anyway certain it would have been better.
jll29 4y ago
> IBM turned instead to their second choice, a small company that was supplying BASIC interpreters to many 8-bit micros. a small company founded by a kid, Bill Gates, whose parents happened to be IBM's lawyers.
- de6u99er 4y ago
  A small but probably important detail!
  - electroly 4y ago
    As far as I can tell it's entirely untrue. Gates's mother wasn't a lawyer at all, and neither of them ever worked for IBM.
    - jll29 4y ago
      As far as I remember, it's from a tech blog or tech history book, but I can't quite remember the exact source right now. In any case, we know Gates father was a lawyer - according to Wikipedia he "co-founded the law firm Shidler McBroom & Gates in 1964, which later became a part of Preston Gates & Ellis LLP (PGE). He practiced with the firm until 1998, when it was merged into the firm now known as K&L Gates. During his career he served as president of both the Seattle/King County Bar Association and the Washington State Bar Association. Gates served on the boards of numerous organizations in the Pacific Northwest, including the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, King County United Way and Planned Parenthood. In 1995, he founded the Technology Alliance, whose mission is to expand technology-based employment in Washington". Regarding his wife, we should state he had two wives, and the second wife apparently had a museum-related career. Gates II first wife, Mary Maxwell Gates was also not a lawyer but studied education, first worked as a school-teacher and then had various board positions. So I retract my initial claim "they were lawyers working for IBM" and replace it by the more precise "Gates father was a lawyer and her mother was on various boards and they both allegedly knew people inside IBM were looking for an operating system at the time". EDIT: I'm based in Europe and a different age group - maybe some HN are from the Washington area and actually witnessed this, it would be quite interesting to learn more about how IBM and Gates actually got together, roles of parents and other intermediaries.
pjmlp 4y ago
Small correction, he acquired QDOS, which was then morphed into MS-DOS.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lproven 4y ago
  Initially, just licensed. Only later acquired. If you're going to correct, you've got to be right! I say this as something of an HN admirer of yours, because you so often comment to people with exactly what I would say myself. We should talk.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Point taken and thanks. :)
AlbertoGP 4y ago
> was more interested that day in going flying his plane than meeting with corporate men in navy suits. (This may be apocryphal.) That day was his wife’s birthday and he had already promised her to go flying. Here it is reported by Stewart Cheifet, his long term co-host of the Computer Chronicles (which is a treasure and freely available in the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles): > “... but it’s just as good. It’s just that that day they came was his wife’s birthday, and he said «Sorry, I’m committed to my wife, we’re gonna go flying» [...] He didn’t have to worry about money, but what killed Gary was just the... he was annoyed at what happened. [...] [Cheifet in an excerpt from Computer Chronicles in 1983:] Gary, are we at the end of the line in the evolution of computer hardware?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdtHS_X1ibg&t=430s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdtHS_X1ibg&t=430s Edit to add: the first video in the Computer Chronicles Archive collection is the “Gary Kildall Special” from 1995, and I quote here a couple of paragraphs: > “In 1976, Gary and his wife Dorothy founded a company called «Intergalactic Digital Research», later shortened to «Digital Research».” > “The main thing that CP/M brought that was different from how anybody else was approaching micro-computers, was that Gary made a logical separation of the physical I/O system from what was called the BDOS. The physical layer system was called the BIOS, the Basic I/O System, and that was the term that Gary used in early CP/M. The BDOS was the Basic Disk Operating System. The BDOS was independent of the specific hardware that you had in your micro-computer. By comparison, we are looking at the time of UNIX being out as a major mini-computer operating system, and you could not move executables of any application program from one UNIX machine, unless it was an identical machine, to another system. So that was really a remarkable innovation.” > “CP/M sold extremely well, and DRI flourished. The company expanded to larger quarters across the street, the number of employees grew from 9 to 24. When the new VAX mini-computer arrived, it was too large to fit inside the building, so the entire structure was lifted off its foundation to accommodate the machine. A beaming Gary told the staff that they would all be getting a «raise» that week.”
- dfxm12 4y ago
  I've got to second checking out Computer Chronicles for anyone at all interested in the history of computers or people just looking for a little nostalgia. The YouTube algorithm suggested it to me a few months back and I've been watching episodes whenever I get a little downtime. Watching John Dvorak teardown a brand new IBM PS/2 literally and figuratively was pretty fun.
forinti 4y ago
Surely the choice of OS cannot depend on a single day. CP/M seemed much nicer.
- Narishma 4y ago
  How was it nicer?
  - lproven 4y ago
    I used CP/M back in the day, on some of the last-ever CP/M computers, the Amstrad PCW series. I still have one: they ran CP/M 3.0, AKA CP/M Plus, the final and richest version. I don't think it was nicer or better. It was simpler, and so arguably cleaner. A CP/M machine generally had at most 64kB of RAM and floppy drives: machines with a hard disk, or with more RAM, were rare. So that meant CP/M could be a lot more minimal than MS-DOS. CP/M grew up into CP/M-86, which turned into Concurrent CP/M, a full multitasking OS. That grew into Concurrent DOS, a full multitasking MS-DOS compatible multiuser OS. And CDOS developed into two things: * DR FlexOS, a real-time multiutasking multiuser OS with a GUI, which is still around today in the form of IBM 4680 and 4690 OS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System Latest update: December 2020. * DR DOS, the original better DOS than DOS. Probably the best-selling and most widely-used member of the family. Still around today as DR OpenDOS. I've been working on it myself. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html ← info & downloads https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/79015.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/79015.html ← VirtualBox VM images
    - dfawcus 4y ago
      Concurrent DOS (CDOS) did not develop in to FlexOS. That confusion comes from the original naming it had, CDOS 286. FlexOS was a new development mainly in C, vs the assembly based Concurrent DOS. This is all obvious from reading the programmer APIs and header files for FlexOS.
      - lproven 4y ago
seemaze 4y ago
Entertainingly clarified in the wonderful podcast 'Advent of Computing' ep. 36 [0]. Highly recommended! [0]https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-36-the-rise-of-cpm https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-36-the-rise-of-...
lproven 4y ago
Yes it's apocryphal. Please stop repeating it. It's disrespectful to the late great Dr Gary Kildall, for a start, and to his cofounder and business partner, the late Dorothy McEwen. From memory and without consulting much in the way of references: * Dr Kildall's personal and business partner Dorothy was the company's cofounder and dealt with contracts etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_McEwen_Kildall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_McEwen_Kildall * Dr Kildall, as the CEO of the most significant microcomputer OS vendor in the world at that time, had his own plane, yes, and he piloted it himself. He was going on a site visit to a major customer. It wasn't for fun; it was a business trip, and it wasn't his job to deal with IBM. * DR had good reasons to refuse the deal. 1. IBM wanted DR to sign a very restrictive NDA; DR had a policy against that. Ms Kidlall refused. MS, as a small company with nothing much to lose, happily signed. 2. IBM offered $250K for an unlimited license. DR quite rightly refused and so did MS. MS retained the rights to licence DOS to other vendors, and it did, a lot, and made a lot of money thereby. The deal IBM offered DR precluded that. * AIUI, MS licensed SCP QDOS for $50K. It only bought it in later on, for a lot more money. It ended up paying $1M for it, and that was still a bargain. This is not ancient history. It was only about 40 years ago. Many of the protagonists are still alive and active, notably Tim Paterson and a certain William H Gates the 3rd.
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  So DR had a dumb policy and were not great negotiators. Gates knew exactly what had fallen into his lap.
  - lproven 4y ago
    No, not really. At the time, IBM made very expensive mainframes and minicomputers, plus all the associated paraphernalia: terminals, printers, storage. It didn't make microcomputers. It didn't really sell to the general public. It sold smaller kit to big businesses, and the bigger kit even they couldn't buy: you could only lease it. Microcomputers were only just beginning to be a product sold to the public for home use. Up until the first few complete, integrated systems in around 1976-1977 (in the USA, the Apple ][, Commodore PET, and original TRS-80), microcomputers had been expensive modular devices, used in business. That's the market DR sold to, and utterly dominated: relatively price S100-bus small business micros. DR was not _a_ big player in microcomputer OSes, it was _the_ big player. Almost the only player: I can't think of any other cross-platform microcomputer OS available in the 1970s. The PC was a highly atypical product for IBM, made from COTS parts, intended to be sold to the public, direct to end-users. It's not really something anyone expected IBM to do, and in this position, it was a company nervously trying to get into a totally new market for them, approaching the industry giant with caps in hands.
piokoch 4y ago
"This may be apocryphal." Yes, you story is not true at all. Bill's mom was higher-up executive in IBM and persuaded company to do business with her son's company, not DR. That gave rise to Microsoft. BTW: for a long time many people were using DR DOS as a much better replacement for MS DOS, which was broken in many places (I did that too). Bill was not very much worried about shipping broken stuff, that's why we have seen "great" stuff like Windows ME or Windows Vista. Sadly, at that point Microsoft was practically a monopoly on the operating system market (Unix/Linux were not a thing, Apple was fighting with its own problems). The good thing that happen to Microsoft and to its users was Windows NT kernel, that was a sort of a rip-off of rather sane VMS kernel, so Windows NT, Windows 2000 and their successors were more or less acceptable operating systems.
- dboreham 4y ago
  > That gave rise to Microsoft Microsoft was already one of the biggest most significant microcomputer software companies.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mbrubeck 4y ago
  > Bill's mom was higher-up executive in IBM This is also not true at all! Mary Gates never worked for IBM. However, she knew IBM's chairman John Opel.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  > "Bill was not very much worried about shipping broken stuff" This goes against claims like[1] where Bill Gates got the spec for Excel Basic (to become Visual Basic for Applications) and read it and annotated it overnight, to grill the the author on the details, and says "Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer." and "Over the years, Microsoft got big, Bill got overextended, and some shady ethical decisions made it necessary to devote way too much management attention to fighting the US government. Steve took over the CEO role on the theory that this would allow Bill to spend more time doing what he does best, running the software development organization, but that didn’t seem to fix endemic problems caused by those 11 layers of management, a culture of perpetual, permanent meetings, a stubborn insistance on creating every possible product no matter what, [...] and a couple of decades of sloppy, rapid hiring" [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
crikeyjoe 4y ago
JJMcJ 4y ago
You could get a CP/M-86 license for the PC. Also Turbo Pascal. But MS-DOS was the cheapest so it prevailed. One of the most impressive things about this is that Bill Gates and MSFT actually had a deal with IBM and came out ahead. Very few companies did this.
- lproven 4y ago
  It was not Turbo Pascal. You are confusing it with the UCSD p-System, a different Pascal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal#UCSD_Pascal_and_the_p-System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal#UCSD_Pascal_and_th... TP was a Borland app which ran on CP/M and later DOS; it would be no use on its own. It was not an OS. The 3 OS choices for the IBM PC were: [1] The UCSD p-System, a Pascal environment with a VM for portable code. [2] PC DOS, IBM's version of MS-DOS. [3] DR CP/M-86, at about 3× the price.
  - JJMcJ 4y ago
    You know, I had UCSD in my head but typed Turbo Pascal. I actually used Turbo Pascal for a project, and found it quite good.
    - lproven 4y ago
      These things happen. Way way back, before DOS and the PC and so on, the UCSD p-System was very widespread. TP supplanted it, but TP on DOS was very different from the original CP/M TP, and indeed with Delphi on Windows it transformed again into something wholly different and much more powerful. Delphi fused Turbo Pascal, its fast compiler and rich capable DOS IDE, with something much like NeXTstep's Interface Builder and a set of OOPS libraries for Pascal to construct GUIs. Which inspired MS to copy it, taking the forms painter from the Ruby database tool, and an extended kinda-sorta BASIC, and some OLE/COM GUI controls, to make something... well, sprawling and unfocused and sluggish and overcomplicated. Then, when MS was seriously afraid that its OS and apps divisions would be split up by the DoJ, which the company forcibly transformed into .NET so it would have a tool for asserting cross-platform apps dominance. But the fierce and determined Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson was replaced with the conciliatory Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, and she backed down and let MS get away with it. So the big split never happened, and MS was left with a fancy cross-platform tool it no longer really needed. The result has been decades of bloat and flab, a somewhat tokenistic FOSS version for Unix-like OSes, and a wasted opportunity... but which nonetheless strangled the 3rd party compiler/dev-tools market on Windows. Mac OS X succeeded because it bundled great dev tools, therefore strangling the Mac dev tools market. And the Linux world does its monastic Unix self-denial thing -- plain text, horrible 1970s text editors, because suffering is good for the soul -- and never goes anywhere much. C++ is an evil modern heresy! We can have 50-line "object" calls in plain C, and it remains clean and holy, just as Saint Ritchie and the prophet Stallman decreed.
drieddust 4y ago
Bill Gates mother having a seat on IBM's board was not a factor in IBM giving him such a sweet deal?
- themadturk 4y ago
  Mary Gates was on the board of United Way; so was IBM's chairman at the time, so they were friendly. She didn't work for as a director of IBM.

by pavlov 4y ago

Neil44 4y ago

CP/M was nice, it's a shame we got saddled with MS-DOS for decades.

pjmlp 4y ago
Having started my MS-DOS path with version 3.3, and used all MS-DOS versions, also the DR-DOS 5.0 and 6.0 versions, experienced CP/M on the Spectrum +3A, I fail to see how CP/M was better.
- mongol 4y ago
  Which directory separator did it have?
  - Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
    CP/M didn't have sub-directories, though it did have 16 "user areas" on a disk.
    - II2II 4y ago
      MS-DOS did not have directories at first either. It was a feature in version 2.0, when hard drive support was added. Directories seem to have been a foreign concept among early home computer operating systems and I suspect its adoption was driven by the adoption of hard drives. For example, the Apple II did not gain directory support until ProDOS was introduced and the Macintosh only gained folders with the introduction of HFS. I don't recall directories existing for the Commodore 64 either.
      - jasomill 4y ago
        Technically, the original Macintosh filesystem supported folders as "an illusion maintained by the system software"[1] in spite of its flat directory structure. [1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/mac/Files/Files-85.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...
      - egypturnash 4y ago
        Directories just weren’t worth it on discs that stored less than 200k. You organized stuff by putting the floppies in the right place in their storage boxes.
    - aidos 4y ago
      Oooo, question for those that might know a little more about this. I had an Amstrad (CPC6128 running CP/M) and I found that if I did cat to list disk contents without a disk in the drive enough times in a row it would eventually list out really random contents. Anyone know what might have been going on.
      - Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
        CAT would have been AMSDOS, not CP/M (it was DIR in CP/M). Not sure what was happening in that case though - it sounds like a bug, but not one I ever recall encountering!
        aidos 4y ago
        Oh interesting. I swear it was cp/m; cat I’m more hazy on (though I feel like I didn’t use dir until ibm dos). I had to really hammer on the command, and it would actually be trying to read either the hardware. I wonder if it was actually a physical issue that triggered it.
        atq2119 4y ago
        Sounds like whatever check that was used to determine whether a floppy was present or not had some small probability of giving a false positive. Maybe because without a floppy, the head would read random data that could pass some integrity check by chance.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    The same as always \, while CP/M didn't even had directories, it was a flat file systems.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    I believe CP/M always used the forward slash as the CLI modifier argument prefix (where Unix would use a dash). MS-DOS inherited this. When directories were eventually added, the forward slash couldn’t be used as a separator because it was already used for modifiers.
    - ratboy666 4y ago
      CP/M does not use forward slash as the CLI modifier. Examples - from the standard CP/M utilities (CP/M 2.2) ASM FILE.ABC .ABC encodes options. Source file for ASM is always .ASM STAT uses $ - STAT FILE $R/O sets file to read-only PIP A:=B:[G0] - PIP (copy, "peripheral interchange program"), uses [ for options, as do later Digital Research programs (like the linker). Basically /no/ Digital Research use of / as option separator. Microsoft used / - for example the command line L80 FILE,FILE/N/E - which means link FILE.REL (relocatable), naming the output FILE.COM, and link and exit. CP/M 2.2 introduced "user areas" - a disk could be divided into 16 user areas (USER 0 to USER 15). There was no "searching" until CP/M 3. CP/NET (Digital Research networking) used [ as a separator. Examples (from CP/NET documentation) A>RMAC SNIOS A>LINK SNIOS[OS] LOGIN {password}{[mstrID]} LOGIN secret[01] would log in to server 01, with password secret NETWORK B:=D:[F] assigned B: to server 0F, drive D: The lack of directories was not such a loss, as the maximum disk size for CP/M 2.2 was 8MB. Remote drives with CP/NET could be much larger (I have used up to 1TB).
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      Forward slash as a modifier prefix was IBM's desire because it was what they used in Mainframe OSes at the time. A lot of MS-DOS things were for "compatibility" with IBM Mainframes at the time. Supposedly, Microsoft was lightly against the forward slash as command argument because they preferred Unix machines at that point as development mainframes and liked the POSIX defaults for forward slash as directory separator. (Which is why MS-DOS even from the early days of the file system often supported both for directory slash in first party commands, even if individual app argument parsers from third parties did not.)
      - skissane 4y ago
        > Forward slash as a modifier prefix was IBM's desire because it was what they used in Mainframe OSes at the time. A lot of MS-DOS things were for "compatibility" with IBM Mainframes at the time Not true. On IBM mainframes, options are generally specified in a NAME=VALUE or NAME(VALUE) format. For example, here is a TSO command to allocate a dataset: ALLOCATE DATASET(ALLOC.FILE1) NEW DIR(4) TRACKS SPACE(2,3) DSORG(PO) RECFM(F) LRECL(80) BLKSIZE(800) CATALOG VM/CMS uses an open parenthesis to introduce options instead, for example: LISTFILE (LABEL The forward slash option style does not come from IBM mainframes. Nor (despite what many people think) does it come from CP/M – CP/M's own option style was to put options in square brackets: PIP B:=A:*.COM [G9 V] Not sure exactly where CP/M gets that from, but may be very vaguely inspired by IBM mainframe conventions (especially VM/CMS), with square brackets replacing parentheses for whatever reason, and using single characters to save memory and typing. What I actually believe happened: forward slash comes from DEC via Microsoft. Microsoft's development tools for CP/M used that option style, which Microsoft got from DEC, because they didn't like CP/M's native option style. QDOS/PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1.0 copied that Microsoft option style. Yes, IBM did tell Microsoft not to change it from / to - between PC-DOS 1.0 and PC-DOS 2.0. But that was simply because IBM cared more about backward compatibility between DOS 1.0 and DOS 2.0 than Microsoft themselves did. It was nothing to do with mainframes. The only thing about DOS which shows any strong direct IBM influence, in terms of actual syntax/terminology/concepts/etc, is code pages.
  - mananaysiempre 4y ago
    Note that the OEM README[1] for MS-DOS 2 (the first version with a hierarchical filesystem) suggests that it was at IBM’s insistence that MS-DOS used backslash for directories and slash for options, rather than slash for directories and hyphen-minus for options (even though Microsoft’s own programs for CP/M apparently used slash for options due to DEC influences, instead of the brackets used by CP/M itself[2], so this is a bit of a tangle). The documentation and examples for CONFIG.SYS[3] also bear an evident Unix influence, note in particular AVAILDEV and SWITCHAR. The MS-DOS-specific calls for file descriptors (as opposed to CP/M-compatible calls for FCBs) are called “XENIX file calls” in the source[4]. (All DOS system calls for files accepted either separator, but the option parsers would retrieve SWITCHAR[5] and give it precedence.) [1] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/README.txt https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30510935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30510935 [3] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/CONFIG.txt https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/... [4] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/XENIX.ASM https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/... [5] http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-2752.htm http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-2752.htm
    - kiwidrew 4y ago
      Yep, there was a (brief) period of time -- before MS-DOS became wildly popular -- when Microsoft was pitching Xenix as the future operating system for the PC. (Also worth noting is that MS-DOS 2.0 was a nearly complete rewrite of the 1.x codebase...)
    - lproven 4y ago
      > it was at IBM’s insistence that MS-DOS used backslash for directories and slash for options I think this is a misinterpretation. See the footnote in this article: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-backslash-as-path-separator/ http://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-back... Look at the positions of `\` and `/` on this keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_F_keyboard#/media/File:IBM_Model_F_XT.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_F_keyboard#/media/File:I... Both were easy-to-type characters on US-layout keyboards, not requiring shift or any other control key.
  - lproven 4y ago
    I am not sure if you are being facetious or not. CP/M did not support subdirectories, so it did not have a directory separator. Its design was derived from a multiuser minicomputer OS (or several of them, principally DEC OS-8) and so it had user areas instead: A1: B6: C3: http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/cpm/cpm_cookbook_user.htm http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/cpm/cpm_cookbook_user....
    - mongol 4y ago
      I am not facetious. I wonder how things would have turned out if CP/M "won".
      - lproven 4y ago
        OK, fair enough. I suppose it's fairly natural to assume from the POV of the 3rd decade of the 21st century that computers from 50 years ago had basic facilities like hierarchical directories... but not all of them did. Big ones like high-end minicomputers did. I learned on VAX/VMS at university in the 1980s, and it did. Cheap low-end minis didn't, and nor did the early 8-bit machines whose design was inspired by low-end minicomputers. The main influences on CP/M were DEC OSes: OS/8 and TOPS-10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPS-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPS-10 The 2nd is mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M#Early_history I have never used either -- I'm not that old -- and I am not sure but I don't think either supported hierarchical subdirectories. The closest thing that evolved into something that did was the DEC OS RSX-11, which influenced VMS. They used a filesystem called DEC Files-11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files-11 So that did end up supporting hierachical directories, but there isn't a "directory separator" per se. That's a UNIX-ism that MS-DOS 2.0 copied. A VMS file in its folder might have been called something like: VAXA$DKA100::[USERS.LPROVEN.SOURCE.FORTRAN]WUMPUS.FOR;42 In other words, devices had multicharacter names that had meaning (e.g. what type of controller board, then which controller, then which disk), possibly after a cluster node name, then in square brackets a folder path separated by dots, then a filename, then another dot, then a 3-letter extension, then a semicolon, then a version number. Looks baroque compared to the dead simple UNIX name style... /home/lproven/source/fortran/wumpus Every time you save a file, the version number increments automatically. And path specs combined with device names and cluster names mean that the filename could point to another disk on this controller, or another disk on a different controller, or a disk on another node in the cluster, or a disk on any node in a named cluster. You can't do that so easily with the Unix naming system. So the sysadmin has to mount folders from other machines into this one's filesystem, and that means also setting up some kind of distributed authentication like NIS or YP or LDAP, and then some PAM modules or something... and it all gets very complicated. In other words, the simplicity of the UNIX design doesn't take complexity away: it just hides it. It's still there but it becomes someone else's problem. Whereas the DEC way of doing things sort of puts the complexity right there in front of you, but in return, you got rich facilities right there. Much less need for Git when files are versioned and you can go back to an older version before you broke something just using info encoded into the filename. Much less need for NFS mounts when the filesystem knows about controllers and networking and clusters and lets you address them. Much less need for bolted-on fancy authentication when that's built into the OS because the designers thought about stuff like networks, clusters, and authentication, when all that got taken _out_ of UNIX and then had to be bolted back on later. So, yeah, the UNIX way is simpler, but OTOH that also means it's poorer. Poorer as in less rich. As in the DEC system was richer: being richer lets you do more. CP/M evolved into multitasking multiuser OSes in time, but DR didn't get to re-invent all this stuff. Maybe if DOS had never happened, DR would have prospered and bought DEC instead of Compaq buying DEC, and this stuff would have made it into PC OSes. Who knows...
- Neil44 4y ago
  To be fair I was thinking about the way MS-DOS solved problems that came along later like having lots more RAM and larger file systems. 640k, expanded memory, extended memory, file size limits. Things that I don't think CP/M was developed long enough to have to solve, so maybe it's not really fair to compare the two.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    It would have probably ended up in similar mess with some different trade-offs and design decisions. Not in anyway certain it would have been better.

jll29 4y ago

> IBM turned instead to their second choice, a small company that was supplying BASIC interpreters to many 8-bit micros. a small company founded by a kid, Bill Gates, whose parents happened to be IBM's lawyers.

de6u99er 4y ago
A small but probably important detail!
- electroly 4y ago
  As far as I can tell it's entirely untrue. Gates's mother wasn't a lawyer at all, and neither of them ever worked for IBM.
  - jll29 4y ago
    As far as I remember, it's from a tech blog or tech history book, but I can't quite remember the exact source right now. In any case, we know Gates father was a lawyer - according to Wikipedia he "co-founded the law firm Shidler McBroom & Gates in 1964, which later became a part of Preston Gates & Ellis LLP (PGE). He practiced with the firm until 1998, when it was merged into the firm now known as K&L Gates. During his career he served as president of both the Seattle/King County Bar Association and the Washington State Bar Association. Gates served on the boards of numerous organizations in the Pacific Northwest, including the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, King County United Way and Planned Parenthood. In 1995, he founded the Technology Alliance, whose mission is to expand technology-based employment in Washington". Regarding his wife, we should state he had two wives, and the second wife apparently had a museum-related career. Gates II first wife, Mary Maxwell Gates was also not a lawyer but studied education, first worked as a school-teacher and then had various board positions. So I retract my initial claim "they were lawyers working for IBM" and replace it by the more precise "Gates father was a lawyer and her mother was on various boards and they both allegedly knew people inside IBM were looking for an operating system at the time". EDIT: I'm based in Europe and a different age group - maybe some HN are from the Washington area and actually witnessed this, it would be quite interesting to learn more about how IBM and Gates actually got together, roles of parents and other intermediaries.

pjmlp 4y ago

Small correction, he acquired QDOS, which was then morphed into MS-DOS.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lproven 4y ago
Initially, just licensed. Only later acquired. If you're going to correct, you've got to be right! I say this as something of an HN admirer of yours, because you so often comment to people with exactly what I would say myself. We should talk.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Point taken and thanks. :)

AlbertoGP 4y ago

> was more interested that day in going flying his plane than meeting with corporate men in navy suits. (This may be apocryphal.) That day was his wife’s birthday and he had already promised her to go flying. Here it is reported by Stewart Cheifet, his long term co-host of the Computer Chronicles (which is a treasure and freely available in the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles): > “... but it’s just as good. It’s just that that day they came was his wife’s birthday, and he said «Sorry, I’m committed to my wife, we’re gonna go flying» [...] He didn’t have to worry about money, but what killed Gary was just the... he was annoyed at what happened. [...] [Cheifet in an excerpt from Computer Chronicles in 1983:] Gary, are we at the end of the line in the evolution of computer hardware?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdtHS_X1ibg&t=430s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdtHS_X1ibg&t=430s Edit to add: the first video in the Computer Chronicles Archive collection is the “Gary Kildall Special” from 1995, and I quote here a couple of paragraphs: > “In 1976, Gary and his wife Dorothy founded a company called «Intergalactic Digital Research», later shortened to «Digital Research».” > “The main thing that CP/M brought that was different from how anybody else was approaching micro-computers, was that Gary made a logical separation of the physical I/O system from what was called the BDOS. The physical layer system was called the BIOS, the Basic I/O System, and that was the term that Gary used in early CP/M. The BDOS was the Basic Disk Operating System. The BDOS was independent of the specific hardware that you had in your micro-computer. By comparison, we are looking at the time of UNIX being out as a major mini-computer operating system, and you could not move executables of any application program from one UNIX machine, unless it was an identical machine, to another system. So that was really a remarkable innovation.” > “CP/M sold extremely well, and DRI flourished. The company expanded to larger quarters across the street, the number of employees grew from 9 to 24. When the new VAX mini-computer arrived, it was too large to fit inside the building, so the entire structure was lifted off its foundation to accommodate the machine. A beaming Gary told the staff that they would all be getting a «raise» that week.”

dfxm12 4y ago
I've got to second checking out Computer Chronicles for anyone at all interested in the history of computers or people just looking for a little nostalgia. The YouTube algorithm suggested it to me a few months back and I've been watching episodes whenever I get a little downtime. Watching John Dvorak teardown a brand new IBM PS/2 literally and figuratively was pretty fun.

forinti 4y ago

Surely the choice of OS cannot depend on a single day. CP/M seemed much nicer.

Narishma 4y ago
How was it nicer?
- lproven 4y ago
  I used CP/M back in the day, on some of the last-ever CP/M computers, the Amstrad PCW series. I still have one: they ran CP/M 3.0, AKA CP/M Plus, the final and richest version. I don't think it was nicer or better. It was simpler, and so arguably cleaner. A CP/M machine generally had at most 64kB of RAM and floppy drives: machines with a hard disk, or with more RAM, were rare. So that meant CP/M could be a lot more minimal than MS-DOS. CP/M grew up into CP/M-86, which turned into Concurrent CP/M, a full multitasking OS. That grew into Concurrent DOS, a full multitasking MS-DOS compatible multiuser OS. And CDOS developed into two things: * DR FlexOS, a real-time multiutasking multiuser OS with a GUI, which is still around today in the form of IBM 4680 and 4690 OS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System Latest update: December 2020. * DR DOS, the original better DOS than DOS. Probably the best-selling and most widely-used member of the family. Still around today as DR OpenDOS. I've been working on it myself. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/58013.html ← info & downloads https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/79015.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/79015.html ← VirtualBox VM images
  - dfawcus 4y ago
    Concurrent DOS (CDOS) did not develop in to FlexOS. That confusion comes from the original naming it had, CDOS 286. FlexOS was a new development mainly in C, vs the assembly based Concurrent DOS. This is all obvious from reading the programmer APIs and header files for FlexOS.
    - lproven 4y ago

seemaze 4y ago

Entertainingly clarified in the wonderful podcast 'Advent of Computing' ep. 36 [0]. Highly recommended! [0]https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-36-the-rise-of-cpm https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-36-the-rise-of-...

lproven 4y ago

Yes it's apocryphal. Please stop repeating it. It's disrespectful to the late great Dr Gary Kildall, for a start, and to his cofounder and business partner, the late Dorothy McEwen. From memory and without consulting much in the way of references: * Dr Kildall's personal and business partner Dorothy was the company's cofounder and dealt with contracts etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_McEwen_Kildall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_McEwen_Kildall * Dr Kildall, as the CEO of the most significant microcomputer OS vendor in the world at that time, had his own plane, yes, and he piloted it himself. He was going on a site visit to a major customer. It wasn't for fun; it was a business trip, and it wasn't his job to deal with IBM. * DR had good reasons to refuse the deal. 1. IBM wanted DR to sign a very restrictive NDA; DR had a policy against that. Ms Kidlall refused. MS, as a small company with nothing much to lose, happily signed. 2. IBM offered $250K for an unlimited license. DR quite rightly refused and so did MS. MS retained the rights to licence DOS to other vendors, and it did, a lot, and made a lot of money thereby. The deal IBM offered DR precluded that. * AIUI, MS licensed SCP QDOS for $50K. It only bought it in later on, for a lot more money. It ended up paying $1M for it, and that was still a bargain. This is not ancient history. It was only about 40 years ago. Many of the protagonists are still alive and active, notably Tim Paterson and a certain William H Gates the 3rd.

hindsightbias 4y ago
So DR had a dumb policy and were not great negotiators. Gates knew exactly what had fallen into his lap.
- lproven 4y ago
  No, not really. At the time, IBM made very expensive mainframes and minicomputers, plus all the associated paraphernalia: terminals, printers, storage. It didn't make microcomputers. It didn't really sell to the general public. It sold smaller kit to big businesses, and the bigger kit even they couldn't buy: you could only lease it. Microcomputers were only just beginning to be a product sold to the public for home use. Up until the first few complete, integrated systems in around 1976-1977 (in the USA, the Apple ][, Commodore PET, and original TRS-80), microcomputers had been expensive modular devices, used in business. That's the market DR sold to, and utterly dominated: relatively price S100-bus small business micros. DR was not _a_ big player in microcomputer OSes, it was _the_ big player. Almost the only player: I can't think of any other cross-platform microcomputer OS available in the 1970s. The PC was a highly atypical product for IBM, made from COTS parts, intended to be sold to the public, direct to end-users. It's not really something anyone expected IBM to do, and in this position, it was a company nervously trying to get into a totally new market for them, approaching the industry giant with caps in hands.

piokoch 4y ago

"This may be apocryphal." Yes, you story is not true at all. Bill's mom was higher-up executive in IBM and persuaded company to do business with her son's company, not DR. That gave rise to Microsoft. BTW: for a long time many people were using DR DOS as a much better replacement for MS DOS, which was broken in many places (I did that too). Bill was not very much worried about shipping broken stuff, that's why we have seen "great" stuff like Windows ME or Windows Vista. Sadly, at that point Microsoft was practically a monopoly on the operating system market (Unix/Linux were not a thing, Apple was fighting with its own problems). The good thing that happen to Microsoft and to its users was Windows NT kernel, that was a sort of a rip-off of rather sane VMS kernel, so Windows NT, Windows 2000 and their successors were more or less acceptable operating systems.

dboreham 4y ago
> That gave rise to Microsoft Microsoft was already one of the biggest most significant microcomputer software companies.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mbrubeck 4y ago
> Bill's mom was higher-up executive in IBM This is also not true at all! Mary Gates never worked for IBM. However, she knew IBM's chairman John Opel.
jodrellblank 4y ago
> "Bill was not very much worried about shipping broken stuff" This goes against claims like[1] where Bill Gates got the spec for Excel Basic (to become Visual Basic for Applications) and read it and annotated it overnight, to grill the the author on the details, and says "Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer." and "Over the years, Microsoft got big, Bill got overextended, and some shady ethical decisions made it necessary to devote way too much management attention to fighting the US government. Steve took over the CEO role on the theory that this would allow Bill to spend more time doing what he does best, running the software development organization, but that didn’t seem to fix endemic problems caused by those 11 layers of management, a culture of perpetual, permanent meetings, a stubborn insistance on creating every possible product no matter what, [...] and a couple of decades of sloppy, rapid hiring" [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

crikeyjoe 4y ago

JJMcJ 4y ago

You could get a CP/M-86 license for the PC. Also Turbo Pascal. But MS-DOS was the cheapest so it prevailed. One of the most impressive things about this is that Bill Gates and MSFT actually had a deal with IBM and came out ahead. Very few companies did this.

lproven 4y ago
It was not Turbo Pascal. You are confusing it with the UCSD p-System, a different Pascal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal#UCSD_Pascal_and_the_p-System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal#UCSD_Pascal_and_th... TP was a Borland app which ran on CP/M and later DOS; it would be no use on its own. It was not an OS. The 3 OS choices for the IBM PC were: [1] The UCSD p-System, a Pascal environment with a VM for portable code. [2] PC DOS, IBM's version of MS-DOS. [3] DR CP/M-86, at about 3× the price.
- JJMcJ 4y ago
  You know, I had UCSD in my head but typed Turbo Pascal. I actually used Turbo Pascal for a project, and found it quite good.
  - lproven 4y ago
    These things happen. Way way back, before DOS and the PC and so on, the UCSD p-System was very widespread. TP supplanted it, but TP on DOS was very different from the original CP/M TP, and indeed with Delphi on Windows it transformed again into something wholly different and much more powerful. Delphi fused Turbo Pascal, its fast compiler and rich capable DOS IDE, with something much like NeXTstep's Interface Builder and a set of OOPS libraries for Pascal to construct GUIs. Which inspired MS to copy it, taking the forms painter from the Ruby database tool, and an extended kinda-sorta BASIC, and some OLE/COM GUI controls, to make something... well, sprawling and unfocused and sluggish and overcomplicated. Then, when MS was seriously afraid that its OS and apps divisions would be split up by the DoJ, which the company forcibly transformed into .NET so it would have a tool for asserting cross-platform apps dominance. But the fierce and determined Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson was replaced with the conciliatory Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, and she backed down and let MS get away with it. So the big split never happened, and MS was left with a fancy cross-platform tool it no longer really needed. The result has been decades of bloat and flab, a somewhat tokenistic FOSS version for Unix-like OSes, and a wasted opportunity... but which nonetheless strangled the 3rd party compiler/dev-tools market on Windows. Mac OS X succeeded because it bundled great dev tools, therefore strangling the Mac dev tools market. And the Linux world does its monastic Unix self-denial thing -- plain text, horrible 1970s text editors, because suffering is good for the soul -- and never goes anywhere much. C++ is an evil modern heresy! We can have 50-line "object" calls in plain C, and it remains clean and holy, just as Saint Ritchie and the prophet Stallman decreed.

drieddust 4y ago

Bill Gates mother having a seat on IBM's board was not a factor in IBM giving him such a sweet deal?

themadturk 4y ago
Mary Gates was on the board of United Way; so was IBM's chairman at the time, so they were friendly. She didn't work for as a director of IBM.