Bill: "MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system" Well said... that's completely true. Those original floppies were I believe 160K. If you paid extra, the box would hold two drives. Later, IBM introduced double-sided drives, at 320K each. The XT model, with a built-in hard drive (10MB as I recall) came out one-and-a-half years after the original, in 1983. With it came MS-DOS 2.0, with a hierarchical file system. Since the forward slash was used for command-line options, paths used a backwards slash. --Marc On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 6:47 AM, William Cheswick wrote: > >>​...​why didn't they have a more capable kernel than MS-DOS? > ​>I don't think they cared. or felt it was needed at the time (I disagreed > then and still do). > > MS-DOS was a better choice at the time than Unix. It had to fit on > floppies, and was very simple. > > “Unix is a system administrations nightmare” — dmr > > Actually, MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system, despite > the last two letters of its name. > This is a term of art lost to antiquity. > Run time systems offered a minimum of features: a loader, a file system, a > crappy, built-in shell, > I/O for keyboards, tape, screens, crude memory management, etc. No > multiuser, no network stacks, no separate processes (mostly). DEC had > several (RT11, RSTS, RSX) and the line is perhaps a little fuzzy: they were > getting operating-ish. > > It all had to fit on a floppy (do I remember correctly that the original > floppyies, SSSD, were 90KB?), run > flight simulator and some business apps. MSDOS lasted a decade, and > served the PC world well, for all its > crapiness. Win 3.1 was an attempt at an OS, and Win 95 an actual one, > with a network stack and everything. > > >I agree with 90% of what he says, but not about Algol 68. He obviously > >has a strong preference for small languages: it would be interesting > >to see his uncensored opinions of C++, the Godzilla of our day as Ada > > I’d be astonished if he had anything good at all to say about C++. > > He’s still around…you could ask him... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: