From: Light Ray <fricke@mae.engr.ucdavis.edu>
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 95 17:50:02 PST
To: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Subject: Re: Microsoft Flame[tm] [NOISE]
In-Reply-To: <m0tSpkY-0008ynC@pacifier.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.HPP.3.91.951221174959.6685C-100000@roboben.engr.ucdavis.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




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