Re: Wonderful ProDOS patch!

[zcaa1122@rpool2.rus.uni-stuttgart.de (Wulf Hofbauer)]

In article <2gdjvc$fd2@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
Victoria M Althoff <valthoff@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> wrote:
>Actually the operating system of choice for the less-enlightened of the time 
>was CP/M.  So SOS looked like CP/M, complete with directory trees, but operated
>more like DOS 3.3 on the A][.
>
>Come on, IBM people, admit it:  MS-DOS is really just a souped up version of 
>CP/M, which was out of date by the time the first Apple ][ rolled off the line!

MS-DOS was developped by a small computer manufacturer (I believe it was
Seattle Computer Products) that had developed
an 8086 board (is was called QDOS which means Quick and Dirty OS). They
waited for CP/M 86 to appear, but it took them too long. So they wrote
a crude CP/M-like mini-OS to go along with that board. QDOS never
was a success, but when IBM was in negotiatons with both Digital Research
and Microsoft for an OS to go with the IBM PC, Microsoft bought the
rights on QDOS which was renamed and appeared as MS-DOS soon.

CP/M never had anything like a hierarchical file system (subdirectories).
So it has just about nothing in common with SOS. SOS rather has as far
as I can tell (I don't have an Apple III) some similarity to Unix (though
it's not a multitasking system). ProDOS is essentially a stripped-down
version of SOS.

CP/M is even more primitive than Apple DOS, but has a better machine
language interface. Newer CP/M's (like CP/M 86 or CP/M 68K or CP/M plus)
are only marginally better than CP/M 80 - they are remarkably primitive
and thus CP/M 86 never became a serious competitor for MS-DOS.

- Wulf
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| Wulf Hofbauer | zcaa1122@rpool1.rus.uni-stuttgart.de |
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