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Comment by deldelaney | Hacker News Reader

Why DOS? 1) Gary Killdall thought too high and mighty of CP/M (maybe rightly) while 2) Bill Gates had nothing to lose from selling IBM what they needed to the new PC. Gates told them what they wanted to hear, and he won. That dweeb was smart and his dad being a lawyer taught him about contracts. He then sold DOS to all the clones with a forced per CPU license, even if MSDos wasn't sold with the Clone. Gates made bank early.

Interesting side note. It took years for PC users to gain multi-user capabilities, mostly when with Novell connected machines and brought file/record locking etc. And before the PC multiuser was already in MP/M and Unix on machines like Altos and Molecular Computer. Killdall would have probably got eht market back if he hadn't died.

And fast forward today, deep down Windows still runs much DOS code. Like Veeger it's morphed into Windows whatever.

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There’s no DOS code running deep down in Windows. What do you have to gain by saying these things?

> There’s no DOS code running deep down in Windows.

Correct.

> What do you have to gain by saying these things?

Stop right there. From the site guidelines: Assume good faith. You've been here long enough that you should know that.

When someone says something wrong, don't immediately assume that they say wrong things because they have something to gain. Don't accuse them of having something to gain. People can just be mistaken.

So correct, but don't accuse.

That was strongly true for a long time through Windows 9*, but with Windows NT/2000 much less so as the core was primarily influenced by David Cutler's experiences with VMS.

The question was not dos vs cpm(both of which are superficially the same thing), but dos vs basic, both provided by Microsoft. People get tripped up with basic being a programing language, but imagine dos only instead of the braindead dos command syntax you had a full basic repl as a command line. Note that good dos(with directories, environment variables, and redirection came much later)

Did microsoft not provide disk and program launching functions in basic? Perhaps dos used less memory, memory was a very very tight commodity in 1981.

To be honest, I don't think BASIC makes a good command line. It's been done but it's not really that great.

As someone who computed in the DOS era, programmed in BASIC, and even installed different command interpreters with more features -- I never once thought that BASIC would have made this better.

The other factor was actually disk and memory size -- you want to keep things as minimal as possible to keep things running fast. When your command line interpreter is reloaded from floppy disk every time you return from a program, you want that to be fast.

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