On Wed, 15 Oct 2025, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
According to historians, and I consider myself one, let us consider what
classic/vintage computers were: The 1970s saw the three amigos: Apple II,
TRS-80 and Commodore PET and the OS was DOS and its ilk + CP/M.
"DOS"??!?
Every operating system called itself "DOS" from 360 through micros. When
IBM MS-DOS/PC-DOS achieved dominance, the generala public started calling
MS-DOS/PC-DOS, "DOS"
IBM explicitly considered "DOS"/"Disk Operating System" to be a
description, NOT A NAME! IBM did not trademark "DOS", nor even "PC-DOS"!
MicroSoft, however, did trademark "MS-DOS"
In 1987, while on family business in Washington, DC, (my father's death),
I went to the patent and trademark office to research trademarking
"XenoSoft" UCSD had already trademarked "XenoFile" (did they ever
actually ship that?)
I also confirmed that "DOS", "PC-DOS" were not trademarked, bu MS-DOS was.
IB_Irrelecant: three weeks later, at the curriculum committee meeting, one
xxxxxxx said that I could not call my OS Class "Microcomputer disk
Operating Systems", because "DOS" and "Disk Operating system" are
REGISTERED TRADEMARKS OF IBM"!!! I still had my stack pass from PTO in
my pocket! Soon after, I managed to get on the curriculum committee to
defend our department from
Like you apparently do, I consider those three (TRS80, AppleII, and
Commodore PET) to have been tied.
first announcement, first prototype, first [trade show] exhibit, first
taking orders, first delivered, first available without pre-order, etc.
are all importaant, but intermingled enough that by picking one of tose as
being "what's important", anybody could argue any one of the three as
being first.
The 1980’s
saw the Dells, HPs and many others with MS-DOS & IBM PC-DOS from QDOS.
But, it behooves us to explicitly mention August 11, 1981 with the release
of the 5150 "PC".
We
saw this and behold ’bring on the clones’(I just had to say this!)
That may have been the title of the article that PCWorld did (they called
XenoCopy, "the acid test", because (at the insitence of the publisher,
that first release version of Xenocopy DRLIBERATELY refused to run on
anything but "real" 5150 (trivail look at some ROM addresses)
https://classiccmp.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/G2BQ5Q3N4S5HCYIDFHOG6XGP6ZEO2G2M/
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred [email protected]
The era
of old computers saw one generation building on the shoulders of giants who
designed these wayback computers(with apologies to Wayback Machine).
Today’s PCs and ARM machines are just the latest iteration of this
theory(by the way not mine).
Happy computing
Murray 🙂
