1 Jul
2016
1 Jul
'16
7:43 p.m.
Bill: "MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system"
Well said... that's completely true.
Those original floppies were I believe 160K. If you paid extra, the box
would hold two drives. Later, IBM introduced double-sided drives, at 320K
each.
The XT model, with a built-in hard drive (10MB as I recall) came out
one-and-a-half years after the original, in 1983. With it came MS-DOS 2.0,
with a hierarchical file system.
Since the forward slash was used for command-line options, paths used a
backwards slash.
--Marc
On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 6:47 AM, William Cheswick <ches(a)cheswick.com> wrote:
>...why
didn't they have a more capable kernel than MS-DOS?
>I don't think
they cared. or felt it was needed at the time (I disagreed
then and still do).
MS-DOS was a better choice at the time than Unix. It had to fit on
floppies, and was very simple.
“Unix is a system administrations nightmare” — dmr
Actually, MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system, despite
the last two letters of its name.
This is a term of art lost to antiquity.
Run time systems offered a minimum of features: a loader, a file system, a
crappy, built-in shell,
I/O for keyboards, tape, screens, crude memory management, etc. No
multiuser, no network stacks, no separate processes (mostly). DEC had
several (RT11, RSTS, RSX) and the line is perhaps a little fuzzy: they were
getting operating-ish.
It all had to fit on a floppy (do I remember correctly that the original
floppyies, SSSD, were 90KB?), run
flight simulator and some business apps. MSDOS lasted a decade, and
served the PC world well, for all its
crapiness. Win 3.1 was an attempt at an OS, and Win 95 an actual one,
with a network stack and everything.
I agree with 90% of what he says, but not about
Algol 68. He obviously
has a strong preference for small languages: it would be interesting
to see his uncensored opinions of C++, the Godzilla of our day as Ada
I’d be astonished if he had anything good at all to say about C++.
He’s still around…you could ask him...