>>I drooled over the DEC Rainbow
Man, that was a sweet machine. Funny, at first, you couldn't format
floppies. You had to buy them from DEC. They changed that later when the
machine sales were in the dumpster.
As I understand it, MS sold IBM a non-exclusive, royalty free MS-DOS license
for under $100,000.
Gates took a gamble. So far, he's ahead.
Ken Elliott
=====================
-----Original Message-----
From: slug@nks.net [mailto:slug@nks.net] On Behalf Of Paul M Foster
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 6:23 PM
To: slug@nks.net
Subject: Re: [SLUG] OT - Why 123 was written for DOS, not CP/M-86
On Sun, Oct 17, 2004 at 08:04:51PM -0400, Ken Elliott wrote:
<snip>
> I won't post the entire message, but here's the key point.
>
> "IBM made the choice easy. Even though they offered both, it was
> clear they were really behind DOS and not at all behind CP/M-86."
>
Of course, this begs the question of why IBM pushed PC-DOS over CP/M-86.
Better licensing terms with Microsoft? Or purely the difficulty in porting
from CP/M to PC-DOS versus the ease of porting from CP/M to CP/M-86, which
might keep Xerox or others out of the market?
I used CP/M-80 on an Epson QX-10, and did some Turbo Pascal programming on
it. I drooled over the DEC Rainbow, but never had much interest in the
IBM-PC.
Paul
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