🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <46878@nigel.ee.udel.edu> johnston@oscar.ccm.udel.edu 

Bill Johnston writes:

   If you are looking for a villain in this situation, look carefully at
   Microsoft.  On the strength of a positively TRIVIAL OS -- MS-DOS, 
   they've extorted tribute from most of the PC-using world.  

As a newcomer to DOS, but not to computers, I'm amazed that DOS has never been
adapted to the current generation of processors.  DOS itself, in its original
version, is just a warmed-over CP/M, making the transition from 8 to 16 bits.
The main CP/M applications, Wordstar and dBASE, were released in DOS versions
within weeks (it seemed at the time); someone had a program that simply rewrote
8080 code as 8086 code.  These programs were of course later optimized for the
new processor and environment, and many other programs were published that were
designed for DOS from the start.  But when the 286 and 386 came out, no
comparable transition took place.  Every other OS that I know has had to adapt
to new hardware, especially bigger address spaces.  It's all in a day's work.
Why hasn't DOS done this?  Because it had an installed base?  That didn't deter
the creators of other operating systems; people adapt.  Other obvious
improvements that should have been made were multitasking and longer file names.
As several people have said here, Windows is just a big kluge to solve problems
that shouldn't be there in the first place.  The copyright issue is another
issue (in which I agree with the critics of Apple).

Christopher Brewster
Cray Research Inc.
612: 683-5759
cb@timbuk.cray.com