[45773] in Cypherpunks
Re: Microsoft Flame[tm] [NOISE]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Light Ray)
Thu Dec 21 21:29:21 1995
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 1995 17:53:53 -0800 (PST)
From: Light Ray <fricke@roboben.engr.ucdavis.edu>
To: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Cc: RobL <robl@on-ramp.ior.com>, cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <m0tSpkY-0008ynC@pacifier.com>
On Thu, 21 Dec 1995, jim bell wrote:
> Well, I disagree. Microsoft succeeded primarily because it was "chosen" by
> IBM in about 1981 or so, needing an OS for their PC. MS didn't even write
> it; Seattle Computer did, and that was a port of CP/M. Not much creativity.
> MSDOS revisions 1.0 and 1.1 were pure crap.
I'm sure that's true to a large extent. However, although I may be
wrong, I beleive that MS's primary reason for initial success was in MS
BASIC. They needed a new OS to go with BASIC, so they used DOS. They
needed a new filesystem to store BASIC files, and thus FAT was born.
Tobin Fricke
