On Fri, 8 Dec 2000, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> Sam Ewalt wrote:
> Sounds like a great deal considering how much a 17" monitor would cost.
> Possible downsides might be Winmodem and proprietary BIOS that would make it
> difficult to run anything other than MS Windows. But I am curious enough to
> check Second Wind PCs. Maybe I could move my Trantor T130B SCSI card and
> Diamond SupraExpress 56i modem from the present computer?
I don't know. This is an old Dell computer. Many others available.
Most without modems.
>
> What OS ran on the PC jr & early XTs? Anybody have experience with
> CP/M (just curiosity on my part, I never saw CP/M in action)? Didn't
> IBM computers have ROM BASIC? All this was long before the World Wide
> Web.
>
The PC jr and the original IBM PC didn't have hard drives. They both
booted to BASIC--the PC had a ROM BASIC and the jr had BASIC on a
cartridge.
You could also boot DOS or CP/M from a floppy. Your choice. I think
I had PC-DOS 1.11 that I used with my PC jr.
The XT came later and was the first PC to have a hard drive.
CP/M as part of the Digital Research family of operationg systems is
still available as a free download from the Lineo ftp site that has
all the DR-DOS versions available. www.drdos.org or www.drdos.net
will take you there.
PC-DOS, IBM-DOS, MS-DOS are all descendents of CP/M, being based on
QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) which was written by a fellow
who was tired of waiting for the 16 bit version of CP/M. Gates bought
QDOS which was a knockoff/hack/clone of CP/M and sold it to IBM with
the provision that he could also sell it to others.
Gary Kildall, the owner of Digital Research and developer of CP/M
declined to sue Gates because he thought he could compete on the
basis of superior technology. CP/M evolved into DR-DOS.
And the rest is history.
Incidently, Microsoft also had available a version of Unix called
Xenix that would run on microcomputers. He thought of selling that
to IBM but it didn't fit IBM's design parameters somehow. If it had,
then there would have been no MS-DOS and most everything today would
already be running a variant of Unix!
This history is fairly well documented in various books about Gates
and Microsoft.
Sam Ewalt
