[Milsurplus] IBM PC

[Dave Emery]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 10:13:47PM -0400, J. Forster wrote:
> Dave Emery wrote:
> 
> >         John is confused here.   The term DOS stood for Disk Operating
> > System and was used by quite a few different and unrelated companies to
> > name their operating system for use with disk hardware back in the 60s
> > and early 70s.
> 
> Mr. Emery is the confused one. He PROVES it in the second sentence of the above
> paragraph. My point was that DOS was around well before CPM, the TRS-90, or ANY of the
> micros.

	I deeply regret belaboring this point, but I think this is sort
of the difference between capital DOS (the Microsoft product which had
its primary antecedents in CPM) and small dos (the generic term in the
60s and 70s for disk operating system.

	In some murky sense the ancestors of MSDOS indeed WERE around
well before CPM, as a number of different individuals and companies had
developed interactive disk operating systems, but none of them were
direct ancestors of MSDOS except CPM and perhaps secondarily one or two
other  more obscure micro operating systems of the era.

	And DG's RDOS has no more relationship to Microsoft MSDOS than
does DEC RT-11 or OS-11 or RSX-11 or a whole list of others even if it
does share the letters DOS with it.

	RDOS did NOT morph into CPM or MSDOS.

	But please lets get back to milsurplus, not computers...


-- 
   Dave Emery N1PRE,  die at dieconsulting.com  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493