Hi, Apologies if this is *slightly* off-topic.
On Fri, Mar 3, 2023 at 7:01 PM Bret Johnson <bretj...@juno.com> wrote: > > Let me just say that the computing world would be a VERY different place than > it is now if Operating Systems > (and maybe even BIOS's) were re-entrant. For one thing, MS probably never > would have became the monolith it did. > I'm not necessarily saying I think it would have been a GOOD idea, but just > that things would be different. The BIOS idea (separate, in ROM) was invented by Gary Kildall, right? Apparently CP/M-86 had a billion derivatives including (according to Wikipedia) Concurrent CP/M-86 3.1 with optional PC-MODE, aka "Concurrent DOS", which eventually evolved into DR-DOS. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiuser_DOS#PCMODE There was also (DR) Novell DOS 7, which supported 286 task swapping and 386 multitasking. And many other (unreleased) projects like "Star Trek": running Mac OS 7 atop Novell DOS on x86. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project But Caldera focused on Linux, so even when they won their lawsuit against MS, they didn't really develop DR-DOS past 7.03 in 1999. (Tiny point releases were made to OEMs or other vendors.) I don't really understand it. It's hard to blame MS for everything. DR clearly had a lot of good releases, but many of them never caught on. I guess when you already have OS/2 and Windows and DOS (and Linux and ...), you don't need ten bazillion more. (I used to fervently read OSNews and try things in VMs or burn CDs to boot. Certainly there are dozens of worthy OSes.) _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
