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Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Having commands for "the DOS" (in the generic sense of a disk operating system) commingled with BASIC was the norm for the Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari 8-bit machines. The PC was definitely the oddball when it came to having a separate DOS command line and BASIC interpreter.

ROM BASIC was available on IBM PCs but clones typically didn't have it.

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The Tandy TRS-80 line of computers which were the bestselling 8-bit computers until 1982 also didn't have commands for "the DOS" commingled with BASIC. The various DOS's available for the platform booted directly from disk.

The basic in ROM on IBM PCs was cassette basic and only supported loading and saving from cassette tapes. Although there might have been an obscure clone manufacturer or two which supported a cassette tape interface, in general clone makers didn't so there was no needed for an embedded cassette basic. Even IBM didn't support a cassette tape interface after the original IBM PC (5150). This meant that for years you could boot an IBM computer to cassette basic but not actually load or save any BASIC programs once you had done so.

The TRS-80 Color Computer's DOS commands were part of Disk Extended Color Basic, unlike the Z-80/68000 based machines.

Probably because it was aimed at business and IBM knew many of their customers would like to use something besides BASIC. So a separate minimal OS and development environments made more sense.

IBM didn't know what to do (no one really did), so you could boot to DOS or you could boot to PC-BASIC. The PC even supported boot to BASIC and load from cassette like a $300 home computer. Crazy times.

IBM had been established for decades before the PC, also the PC in general was established for years before their entry. I think they knew what to do. It was a bit of a gamble, sure. And you can make the argument they guessed wrong. But the success of the PC and subsequent crushing of the rest of the industry was incredibly successful.

The flexible design did catch on, simultaneously a blessing and a curse to IBM.

By the way, most Atari 8-bits had BASIC built-in, but the earliest machines, the 400, 800 and 1200XL, did not.

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