Chris Jones wrote:
I seem to remember back in the mists of time long lost that DOS 1.1 was actually using very similar commands to unix (notably cd, mkdir, but _not_ more or ls, for some reason best known to a certain W Gates who apparently jointly wrote PC-DOS as it was then called).
Jim Cornette replied:
I don't remember that farback in versions of DOS. The story that I heard was that he bought the OS off of some other individual or small company. (Dirty DOS or something) Then sold the OS bought for a small fraction, then sold it to IBM. Then IBM cleaned out a slew of bugs.
Well, I don't remember that far back personally, either. But Eric Raymond claims it was Tim Paterson who wrote Quick and Dirty OS in six weeks at http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/MS-DOS.html, which bears out what I've heard elsewhere.
Dos 1 never had subdirectories: that came in DOS 2. DOS 2 was intended, back in those dim distant days, to be a migration path to Xenix, a rather awful port of Unix to run on the PCs of those days. So that's where the Unix-a-like syntax came from. (The PC market didn't want to migrate, unless they could run all their existing programs as well as they could on DOS. This started a trend that has been the Curse of the Computer Industry for the next twenty-odd years).
I don't think IBM got seriously into DOS code until around DOS 4, when it was obvious that it was going to be a major IBM product line.
James.
Thanks for the link. I guess not remembering those versions is probably for the best.
I seem to remember various IBM DOS versions. A few DOS 3.x, no 4.x, 5, 6.0 then 6.22.
Then the disappearance of pctools and stacker from mainstream view.
Jim
