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Thank you for this. Many people today don't realize just how influential DEC was on early computing.
by icedchai 2y ago
Thank you for this. Many people today don't realize just how influential DEC was on early computing.
- lproven 2y agoI know. Most of why DOS, Windows, OS/2, WinNT and all of Windows 11 and Windows Server today are how they are -- the name-dot-three-letter-extension filenames, the directory structure, drive letters, the basic commands, the config file formats, all of it -- owes to ancestry in DEC OSes. Gary Kildall worked with DEC minis. He wrote CP/M in PL/M, designing it to be a DEC-like OS for the new Intel 8080. DR did great. Became big. It was very slow with CP/M-86 for the new 8086. So, Tim Paterson of SCP wrote his own tiny OS in assembler that used the documented public CP/M API, but the disk format from Microsoft Standalone Disk BASIC. (That's now called "FAT".) MS licensed it, and later bought it, and renamed it MS-DOS. MS-DOS is a reproduction of a reproduction of a DEC OS. Mostly TOPS-10. https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-backslash-as-path-separator/ https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-bac... TOPS-10 ran on the PDP-10, the big brother of the PDP-6, which is the direct ancestor of the PDP-7 on which UNIX was built. Some effort went into OS/2 and some of that influenced NT. NT was build with an input of code from the big brother of the PDP-11 OS. No wonder it's DEC-like: it's got direct DEC ancestry on one side and indirect on the other. It's the offspring of 2 cousins.