sundialsvcs |
03-14-2023 10:40 AM |
"Operating systems" date to the very earliest computers. Every model had to have one. You can't run programs on anything without the means to load them, and then to create the context in which they are to run. Primitive though they sometimes were, they were "operating systems."
When the IBM PC project was underway, Microsoft declined to license CP/M, much to the dismay of Gary Kildall, and instead decided to – time being of the essence – purchase a more suitable system, which it took over the patent rights to and renamed "PC-DOS" then "MS-DOS." Probably the most important technical reason was the then-novel "redundant FAT" system for disk space allocation, which was much better than CP/M's approach. Microsoft wrote several extensive articles about it in BYTE Magazine – copies of which I still have somewhere. They convincingly made the case that it was "simply, better." And it was. The FAT system prospers to this day ... warts and all ... and in its day it made a one Peter Norton a lot of money. It became the lingua franca of disk formats, supported by everyone, even as the MS-DOS operating system itself passed on into the limelight.
But there were many contemporary computers at that time, and all of them had their own proprietary OSes. "You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all different." The Commodore Amiga, for instance, fully embraced multi-processing long before anyone else did, and they did it very cleanly. Even though the 68000 microprocessor didn't have hardware memory protection or virtual memory, and so "GURU Meditations" were a fact of life which (unlike "GPFs") crashed the entire system. ("Guru Meditation?" Yes. Programmers are also known for having a weird sense of humor ...)
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