Re: DOS 1 & 2

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Kallikak wrote:

> On Apr 23, 7:47 am, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > Bryan Parkoff wrote:
> >
> > >    Steve Woz and his contractor developed DOS 1 and DOS 2 for Apple II.
> > > DOS 1 and DOS 2 were used for beta testing, but they were never released to
> > > the public until DOS 3.1 became available.  Correct?  Do you have idea what
> > > DOS 1 and DOS 2 look like unfinished RWTS routines?
> >
> > AFAIK, DOS 3.1 was the first publicly available version.
> >
> > Since Woz wrote RWTS in the process of developing the Disk ][ drive and
> > controller, it's safe to say that RWTS preceded any DOS version.
> >
> > The very first RWTS may have been 4+4 coding, but Woz quickly progressed
> > to 5+3, then later to 6+2.  The final iteration was the ProDOS-style
> > RWTS that decodes nibbles to data on the fly.
>
> DOS 1 and 2 were not used for beta testing according to Paul Laughton
> (the contractor who wrote them).  Look here for details
> http://www.laughton.com/Apple/Apple.html.

His story makes it clear that the decimal point in the version
number was a complete fiction:

>Why was the first release of Apple DOS called Apple DOS 3.1?
>
>Every time I recompiled the code, I incremented a revision counter. The
>counter started at Rev 0.1. Whenever I got to (n).9, I would roll the
>counter over to (n+1).0 The first listing I gave Apple was Rev 2.8.
>They (I forget who) decided they could not call it DOS 2.8, so they
>changed it to DOS 3.0. Apple did the beta testing with this version 
>(2.8 renamed 3.0). When Apple shipped the DOS for revenue, they
>incremented it to 3.1 to indicate that the code had changed from the
>beta version. As a final note, when I transferred the source code to 
>Apple in October, 1978 the Rev number was up to 6.3.

-michael

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