3 ms·

I remember the very high price of CP/M-86. If that was because of DRI's pricing and not something IBM did, then indeed that made the choice simple, in Kildall's

by Tor3 1y ago

I remember the very high price of CP/M-86. If that was because of DRI's pricing and not something IBM did, then indeed that made the choice simple, in Kildall's disfavour.

WalterBright 1y ago
As I recall, Kildall thought that CP/M-86 was much better than MSDOS, and people would pay the higher price. He was unable to make the case, though. I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not better.
- skissane 1y ago
  > I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not better. Comparing PC-DOS 1.0 to CP/M-86 1.0, I don’t think there are huge differences in features - maybe FAT12 is a more efficient filesystem; PC-DOS records file sizes to the byte, CP/M files are made up of 128 byte records, and although there is a filesystem attribute to say how many bytes in last record are used (file size mod 128), it has to be implemented at the application level; DOS had EXE files (wasn’t in SCP 86-DOS, was added by Microsoft), I think CP/M by then had something similar? Neither had directories yet, but CP/M had “user areas” which were a kind of limited equivalent. I think if they’d ported MP/M instead of CP/M (which I believe they did later), it would have been a more compelling offering-multitasking-but I suppose that would have made it even later to the market than it already was.
  - canucker2016 1y ago
    The CP/M-86 wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86 )lists the IBM PC version release date as 1982-04-05, several months after the Aug 12 1981 IBM PC introduction. According to this wired.com page, https://www.wired.com/2011/08/0812ibm-5150-personal-computer-pc/ https://www.wired.com/2011/08/0812ibm-5150-personal-computer..., IBM had sold 65K PCs in 4 months.
ndiddy 1y ago
According to the oral history of Tom Rolander (VP of engineering at DRI, he was in the famous IBM meeting), IBM wanted to call CP/M-86 "PC-DOS" and pay a one-time licensing fee, but DRI said they had to keep it as CP/M-86 and pay a per-device royalty. About a month after the meeting, Rolander heard through the grapevine that IBM had licensed QDOS instead of CP/M-86 for their operating system. Kildall informed IBM that he was already aware of QDOS and was preparing a lawsuit against SCP because he believed it to be an illegal CP/M clone. To defuse the situation, IBM promised that they wouldn't bundle an OS with the PC, would offer PC-DOS, CP/M-86, and UCSD P-System alongside the PC, and would pay the royalties up front for some large number of copies of CP/M-86. The condition was that DRI wouldn't sue IBM or Microsoft over the similarities between QDOS and CP/M. When the PC was released, Kildall and Rolander discovered they had been double crossed: > So we got the notice about the rolling out and all the rest of that, and so as Gary and I were want to do, we flew up to San Jose and took a cab over to the IBM store, and we came in the store, and sure enough there was the IBM PC sitting there, and here were the three boxes of the operating system. And we looked at this and the IBM PC-DOS was priced at $40, and then over here was CP/M and it was priced at I’m pretty sure it was $260. It was more than $200 above PC-DOS, and I don’t even remember what the UCSD P-System was. But we looked at that and I’ve never had my face slapped in my life, but I know what it would feel like to have my face slapped. It was such an unexpected thing. I mean we had totally assumed that this was going to be a level playing field, that PC- DOS was going to be priced the same as CP/M, the same as the UCSD P-System, and that we were going to let the market, the users decide which one, which clearly it wasn’t. And Gary described that day later on in his memoirs as kind of the day innocence was gone. Here's a link to the full oral history if you're interested: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2017/02/102717253-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
- skissane 1y ago
  > It was such an unexpected thing. I mean we had totally assumed that this was going to be a level playing field, that PC- DOS was going to be priced the same as CP/M, the same as the UCSD P-System, and that we were going to let the market, the users decide which one, which clearly it wasn’t. And Gary described that day later on in his memoirs as kind of the day innocence was gone. This seems like a rather unrealistic expectation when one has per-device royalties and the other hasn’t. Of course, that probably can’t fully explain the magnitude of the price difference-which may indeed have involved some underhandedness on IBM’s part-but a vendor who charges a reseller more for a product than its competitor and then complains that reseller sells its product for a higher price the competitor’s, is being a bit silly

by Tor3 1y ago

I remember the very high price of CP/M-86. If that was because of DRI's pricing and not something IBM did, then indeed that made the choice simple, in Kildall's disfavour.

WalterBright 1y ago

As I recall, Kildall thought that CP/M-86 was much better than MSDOS, and people would pay the higher price. He was unable to make the case, though. I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not better.

skissane 1y ago
> I tried CP/M-86, and found it to be different, but not better. Comparing PC-DOS 1.0 to CP/M-86 1.0, I don’t think there are huge differences in features - maybe FAT12 is a more efficient filesystem; PC-DOS records file sizes to the byte, CP/M files are made up of 128 byte records, and although there is a filesystem attribute to say how many bytes in last record are used (file size mod 128), it has to be implemented at the application level; DOS had EXE files (wasn’t in SCP 86-DOS, was added by Microsoft), I think CP/M by then had something similar? Neither had directories yet, but CP/M had “user areas” which were a kind of limited equivalent. I think if they’d ported MP/M instead of CP/M (which I believe they did later), it would have been a more compelling offering-multitasking-but I suppose that would have made it even later to the market than it already was.
- canucker2016 1y ago
  The CP/M-86 wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86 )lists the IBM PC version release date as 1982-04-05, several months after the Aug 12 1981 IBM PC introduction. According to this wired.com page, https://www.wired.com/2011/08/0812ibm-5150-personal-computer-pc/ https://www.wired.com/2011/08/0812ibm-5150-personal-computer..., IBM had sold 65K PCs in 4 months.

ndiddy 1y ago

According to the oral history of Tom Rolander (VP of engineering at DRI, he was in the famous IBM meeting), IBM wanted to call CP/M-86 "PC-DOS" and pay a one-time licensing fee, but DRI said they had to keep it as CP/M-86 and pay a per-device royalty. About a month after the meeting, Rolander heard through the grapevine that IBM had licensed QDOS instead of CP/M-86 for their operating system. Kildall informed IBM that he was already aware of QDOS and was preparing a lawsuit against SCP because he believed it to be an illegal CP/M clone. To defuse the situation, IBM promised that they wouldn't bundle an OS with the PC, would offer PC-DOS, CP/M-86, and UCSD P-System alongside the PC, and would pay the royalties up front for some large number of copies of CP/M-86. The condition was that DRI wouldn't sue IBM or Microsoft over the similarities between QDOS and CP/M. When the PC was released, Kildall and Rolander discovered they had been double crossed: > So we got the notice about the rolling out and all the rest of that, and so as Gary and I were want to do, we flew up to San Jose and took a cab over to the IBM store, and we came in the store, and sure enough there was the IBM PC sitting there, and here were the three boxes of the operating system. And we looked at this and the IBM PC-DOS was priced at $40, and then over here was CP/M and it was priced at I’m pretty sure it was $260. It was more than $200 above PC-DOS, and I don’t even remember what the UCSD P-System was. But we looked at that and I’ve never had my face slapped in my life, but I know what it would feel like to have my face slapped. It was such an unexpected thing. I mean we had totally assumed that this was going to be a level playing field, that PC- DOS was going to be priced the same as CP/M, the same as the UCSD P-System, and that we were going to let the market, the users decide which one, which clearly it wasn’t. And Gary described that day later on in his memoirs as kind of the day innocence was gone. Here's a link to the full oral history if you're interested: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2017/02/102717253-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

skissane 1y ago
> It was such an unexpected thing. I mean we had totally assumed that this was going to be a level playing field, that PC- DOS was going to be priced the same as CP/M, the same as the UCSD P-System, and that we were going to let the market, the users decide which one, which clearly it wasn’t. And Gary described that day later on in his memoirs as kind of the day innocence was gone. This seems like a rather unrealistic expectation when one has per-device royalties and the other hasn’t. Of course, that probably can’t fully explain the magnitude of the price difference-which may indeed have involved some underhandedness on IBM’s part-but a vendor who charges a reseller more for a product than its competitor and then complains that reseller sells its product for a higher price the competitor’s, is being a bit silly