IBM bashing / OSF / SVID / added pennies

[Rahul Dhesi]

In article <1260 at ficc.UUCP> peter at ficc.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>And we're talking about a different CP/M, too. I don't recall any serious
>deficiencies in CP/M that weren't shared by the early PC-DOS...

CP/M had no expandability.  With MS-DOS you *began* with 64 K,
remember?  With CP/M, you finished there.

With the IBM PC you got a turnkey machine with slots for expandability,
a standard BASIC-in-ROM, and the promise of repair service
*nationwide*.  To the best of my knowledge there was no other machine
in the same price range at that time that had this.  You'll be
surprised how many people (perhaps close to 100% of the first users)
wrote all their applications in BASIC.  With competing CP/M machines,
there was no standard programming environment, since everybody's video
display and language interpreter was slightly different.  The IBM PC
was the only machine for which you could write a good graphics program
(for the color/graphics display) and expect it to work on all
machines.

But CP/M did last a little longer, thrashing and desperately struggling
to survive, while MS-DOS added a hierarchical file system, loadable
device drivers, I/O redirection and pseudo-pipes, and the ability to
know how long a file was, not just guess.  And when we went shopping,
we found that we didn't have to spend $150 for CP/M-86, since MS-DOS
was only forty bucks!

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.

The DEC Rainbow was the only other system that could boast of a
nationwide service network, but what with the lack of software and
hardware expandability and the horrendously unreliable disk drives, it
was doomed from the beginning.  Then DEC further confused its users by
providing both CP/M and MS-DOS, but carefully making sure you could
neither transfer files between the two nor format disks under either.

Copyright 1988 Rahul Dhesi.  Permission granted for Usenet distribution.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi