On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 6:33 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
Eric Walker <eric.wal...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Gates was at the helm of Microsoft when it acquired DOS. DOS came out >> many years after and was an anorexic imitation of UNIX. >> > > That is incorrect. They brought it out within months, not years. > I had in mind the initial release dates, not the time to market: UNIX, April, 1969. DOS, August, 1981. That's 12 years to learn from an excellent, pathbreaking operating system. In this context it matters little to say DOS was a CP/M clone rather than a UNIX clone (as others have rightly pointed out). Those twelve, blessed years were made available by a divine providence to the people making decisions about operating systems, and then utterly wasted on them when they came up with DOS (or CP/M). (I imagine there were other good OSs other than UNIX at the time, although this is the one from that era I am most familiar with.) It was not long before UNIX was ported to the PC, so it also does not matter that UNIX was developed for a timesharing environment. An early incompatibility between UNIX and the early PCs was the lack of memory protection, but this was eventually added as well. Eric
