On 2021-08-14 09:14, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
> My memory of 1982, was recommending a Northstar running CPM and Pascal to
> replace a Card Punch in my first job in Canberra. Learned from that about
> Market Power.
>
> Ofcourse IBM famously licensed MSDOS and the rest as they say is history.
Indeed it is! According to Wikipedia:
> Many expected that CP/M would be the standard operating system for 16-bit
> computers.[64] In 1980 IBM approached Digital Research, at Bill Gates'
> suggestion,[65] to license a forthcoming version of CP/M for its new product,
> the IBM Personal Computer. Upon the failure to obtain a signed non-disclosure
> agreement, the talks failed, and IBM instead contracted with Microsoft to
> provide an operating system.[66] The resulting product, MS-DOS, soon began
> outselling CP/M.
(at Bill Gates' suggestion?!!) and
> A number of behaviors exhibited by Microsoft Windows are a result of backward
> compatibility with MS-DOS, which in turn attempted some backward
> compatibility with CP/M. The drive letter and 8.3 filename conventions in
> MS-DOS (and early Windows versions) were originally adopted from CP/M.[75]
> The wildcard matching characters used by Windows (? and *) are based on those
> of CP/M,[76] as are the reserved filenames used to redirect output to a
> printer ("PRN:"), and the console ("CON:"). The drive names A and B were
> used to designate the two floppy disk drives that CP/M systems typically
> used; when hard drives appeared they were designated C, which survived into
> MS-DOS as the C:\> command prompt.[77] The control character ^Z marking the
> end of some text files can also be attributed to CP/M.[78] Various commands
> in DOS were modelled after CP/M commands, some of them even carried the same
> name like DIR, REN/RENAME, or TYPE (and ERA/ERASE in DR-DOS).
Identifying peripheral devices by letter sounds to me very much like a hardware
engineer's approach, compared with the hierarchical directory structure of
Unix-like systems.
> Where have Control Data Corporation, Cyber76, Prime Computers, Digital
> Equipment Corporation, PDP11, CSIRONET all gone?
>
> FORTRAN is still going strong! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran
If any old Fortran hands would like to try it out again, GCC Fortran is
included in most Linux distributions. It's certainly in OpenSuSE and probably
also in the Microsoft Linux distribution licensed in Windows 10.
Gone is the evil "goto" in favour of if ... then ... else, it supports
object-oriented design, exception conditions (Fortran 2003?), and other more
advanced software engineering.
The Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) is interesting too. If I remember correctly,
it supports many of the languages mentioned by Marghanita, including Pascal and
C++, by parsing the original source code into a common pseudo-code and
compiling that.
David Lochrin
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