OT: Programming in C

Bill Davidsen davidsen at tmr.com
Sun Apr 27 23:17:16 UTC 2008


g wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Bill Davidsen wrote:
>> Heard of it, had a friend who was a big DRDOS user, you missed me asking
>> him by a few months, he just died.
> 
> my condolences on lost of your friend.
> 
> drdos, do not recall which version, but it was just before msbsdos, had a
> a 3 key combo that when entered, it would display os version.
> 
> bg disassembled drdos, made changes and repackaged it and released it as
> 'his' msdos version of cp/m.
> 
> a user of drdos bought a copy and while using it, noted that there was a lot
> of similarity to drdos. out of curiosity, he pressed the 3 key combo and up
> popped 'drdos ver. x.xx' (do not recall version), after which he contacted
> digital research and informed them.
> 
> being that digital research's owner was friends with bg, he told bg that he
> was a bad boy and that if he would make changes, they would not sue him, so
> bg made changes and released a new version. rest is history and a loss of
> digital research.
> 
I confess I don't recall hearing about msbsdos, even though I was 
tracking much of that stuff at the time, since I was doing both hardware 
and software evaluations. But there are a lot of odd stories which are 
true, so anything is possible.

For instance, I used to use S100 computers for industrial control, both 
8085, Z80, and 8088 (from Seattle Computers). Seattle Computers came out 
with a 16 bit board for S100, and needed software for it, so they had 
one of their software guys sit down and write a CP/M clone from scratch, 
called QDOS (quick and dirty OS). Microsoft bought the rights to that 
for cheap (as reported in various articles of the day) and called it 
MSDOS...


-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot




More information about the fedora-list mailing list