IBM bashing / OSF / SVID / added pennies

[Mitch Mlinar]

In article <3660 at bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>
>CP/M had no expandability.  With MS-DOS you *began* with 64 K,
>remember?  With CP/M, you finished there.
>

Unless you had banked memory CP/M.  However, it is still true that any given
task could only be performed in 64k.  My "typical" CP/M setup these days has
1M of RAM, multitasking, and lots of RAM disk at 10MHz of 64180 power.  It
blows the doors the normal PC and fights for speed with the original AT.
Although it is clearly not as powerful as an AT by most measures, as matched
to an IBM PC, there are only two differences .  Graphics was *the* key, no
doubt about it.  Extra usable program memory certainly helped, but it also
made some programs turn into RAM pigs.

Given the inefficiency of IBM compilers as compared to the tight code you
*had* to have for CP/M, the ratio is somewhere between 2:1 or 3:1 in code
size.  The same C program (compiled on a number of compilers like MS-DOS,
Lattice, and Power C) by myself [to prove a point in Feb of this year],
averaged 2.8x larger on the IBM than CP/M.  Yes, the code should be bigger
since the average instruction length is longer, but not by that much.  Only
the data structures are the same size.

Of course, if you throw in lots of floating pt, and/or you happen to have a
co-processor, this ratio drops slightly.

>
>And then, when Lotus 1-2-3 came out, and it worked only on an IBM PC
>using MS-DOS, the final blow had been struck against CP/M. 
>

which is why MicroPro is selling WordStar4 for CP/M (released just this past
year) and MicroSoft was considering re-releasing some of their 8-bit
stuff!?!!?  In fact, I have seen my software sales INCREASE on CP/M over the
past 18 months.  I would *hate* to see what my sales base would be if CP/M
was not dead as you claimed .... :-) :-)

I am now going to twist this around on you: IBM DOS is dead.

I think that CP/M and early IBM DOSes are converging on the same obsolete
boat.  With (a) UN*X, (b) OS/2, (c) no future versions of DOS, (d) no future
machines with anything less than a 80286 and (e) major vendors jumping to the
newer OSes, IBM DOS must be dead [paraphrased from 3 computer journals during
the past months]; this sounds awful familiar to me.  And, just like CP/M, the
death of IBM DOS will be announced every year for the next decade because it
refuses to *really* die.

Companies are moving away from IBM-PC 8088 for 386/Suns/MacIIs, but a large
chuck of home computers will still be around.  Now and ten years from now.
The "appliance" users *always* move on as they can afford it. But if you have
a computer at home, you are more than likely a hobbyist without the bank in
your hip pocket to buy the latest machine that comes along every couple of
years.

I have been through it already with CP/M; IBM-PC friends who are sweating
OS/2s impact on the little 8088 machine need not worry.  IBM DOS will not
vaporize overnight either.  As long as the computer meets your needs,
whatever those are, and there are others who feel the same, it is not
obsolete.

-Mitch