OT: Programming in C

g geleem at bellsouth.net
Mon Apr 28 20:40:15 UTC 2008


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Bill Davidsen wrote:
> I confess I don't recall hearing about msbsdos, even though I was
> tracking much of that stuff at the time, since I was doing both hardware
> and software evaluations. But there are a lot of odd stories which are
> true, so anything is possible.

i do not recall now just what he called his os, after all, it has been some
time back and another reason i wish i had keep disk copy i was given.

i guess saying bgbsdos would have been more appropriate term to use.

i was a hardware head using z80 al and wrote a lot of controller and
instrumentation programs for photo finishing labs.

i wasted my time with one lab that keep promising to go digital, but also
kept putting it off. what hurt most was their shutting down with out saying
anything until last month of business.

> For instance, I used to use S100 computers for industrial control, both
> 8085, Z80, and 8088 (from Seattle Computers).

i started reading up on micros with 4004 and rca 6k2 series. did not care
for intel too much as their language seemed backwards.

when zilog came out with their dual registries and port control, i went with
it and cromemco, later moving on with motorola 6k8 and 68k series. i do miss
them.

> called QDOS (quick and dirty OS). Microsoft bought the rights to that
> for cheap (as reported in various articles of the day) and called it
> MSDOS...

now that you mention qdos, i do remember it. i never used it as it would not
run in a cromemco system. those who did have it did like it, until bg got his
hands on it.

zilog lost out on 'public user system' and went heavy into control and
military, but due to public and collage support, along with ibm and tandy,
intel and ms jumped far out in lead.

tandy. reminds me of another one. model 2, 8" floppy disk. tandy got bg to
write them a system and wanted a lot of 'bells and whistles' among which was
to show progress of formating and such. being that 8" was 26 sectors, there
was no way to show 26 in a pleasant way. simple enough, they cut back to 25
sectors for a 5 x 5 grid and put a copyright notice in 26.

i do not recall his name, but a very clever programmer wrote up a bunch of
enhancements for trsdos and advertised how much it could do with out using
up disk space. he wrote a routine that when called, would use his own disk
access calls to read and write to sector 26, leaving copyright in tact, and
all of his subroutines were written there.


- --

tc,hago.

g
.


without fences, who needs gates.

- --.
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