This was prompted partly by a positive response to clarifying some FUD on a vintage computer group. Millennials run 1990s computers for fun to play 1990s games but the everyday details of how and why stuff got to how it did is legend to them.
Few websites will describe it honestly, because many of the companies are still around and fiercely litigious. :-(
ConcurrentDOS got adapted into IBM's 4680 software - which powered most supermarket tills for a good decade or two. It was very weird: looked like MS-DOS. Many of the MS-DOS commands worked as you'd expect, but it was multi-user and multi-tasking.
And surprised you didn't mention Windows "mysterious" bugginess when run on DR-DOS...
I'm almost certain 4680 was 286. IBM had two very similar supermarket systems that ran on it (General Sales Application and Supermarket Application and a quick google shows Store Management Application as well). They were written in BASIC, and had the concept of User Includes - the system would include an (initially empty) file at various points in the code (when printing stuff, when displaying stuff, after scanning a barcode, before opening cash drawer etc.), along with a bunch of documented variables. Allowing supermarkets to edit the include files to customise the code.
I believe 4690 apps were written in an early dialect of java instead, where presumably inheritance would be used instead of user includes.
Well, it turns out that I don't actually work for anybody at the moment and haven't since June, February, September last year, 2011/12, 2003/04 or 2002 depending on which of my former associates' ejaculations can be believed. So I guess that they can't object to anything I write on the basis of Intellectual Property ownership, or that I'm bringing the company into disrepute, and so on.
MS had a project to do a multitasking DOS 4...
I'm not entirely sure about this but my recollection of the reference manuals (from an ICL computer) suggest that it also introduced DLLs, OS functions (which were somewhat OS/2-ish) provided by named entry points and so on. In short, it was very much a prototype of ideas that MS reused to good effect some years later.
DR noticed this. Its CP/M-86 was late, expensive and so lost out to MS...DR had MP/M-80 on bank-switched 8-bit systems: Grey Matter was using one into the 90s. CP/M-86 was the analogue of CP/M-80, CCP/M-86 was to CP/M-86 what MP/M-80 was to CP/M-80. One interesting distinction though was
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Re: Liam on DOSliam_on_linuxJuly 26 2019, 12:17:54 UTC
I know what you mean. I suspect it's like my occasional urge to run OS/2 again. After a few hours failing to get it to install, I remember why I left
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MS had a boxed "Workgroups for DOS" product that was fairly decent, controlled by the standard "net use" etc. commands. I'm not sure, but I think I ran it with PC-DOS on occasion.
DR-DOS added more file timestamps and password protection, but the latter was a very weak "security by obscurity".
/However/, one of the things that mitigated against DOS being used as a TCP/IP client was that while all the stacks (or at least the ones I've looked at) had APIs that were broadly based on Berkeley Sockets their actual binary calling conventions were completely different... and by that I mean that WGfD and the DOS clients that came with NT and OS/2, not to mention the DOS API in WfWG and definitely not to mention the stacks from FTP Software and the rest completely lacked binary compatibility.
On the server side, DOS would have been problematic due to limited (documented) multitasking: it was difficult to set up a thread to wait for activity on a specified port or socket.
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I also remember that QEMM would run under concurrent CP/M which made for some very interesting behaviours!
Mike
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Few websites will describe it honestly, because many of the companies are still around and fiercely litigious. :-(
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I did try a 286 EMS manager, Blue Max I think, on an IBM Model 60 running 3Com 3+Share. I wanted to give it some extra RAM for a disk cache.
It did install and apparently function. The DOS-based NOS could see the EMS.
But it didn't /work./
Cue 20YO Liam spending about 2 days manually recovering 14,000 word processor files from the corrupted hard disk... for no pay...
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And surprised you didn't mention Windows "mysterious" bugginess when run on DR-DOS...
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I believe 4690 apps were written in an early dialect of java instead, where presumably inheritance would be used instead of user includes.
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I have now found what may be a copy. It's a bunch of EXE files, though. I will put it in a VM and prod it very carefully with a stick...
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MS had a project to do a multitasking DOS 4...
I'm not entirely sure about this but my recollection of the reference manuals (from an ICL computer) suggest that it also introduced DLLs, OS functions (which were somewhat OS/2-ish) provided by named entry points and so on. In short, it was very much a prototype of ideas that MS reused to good effect some years later.
DR noticed this. Its CP/M-86 was late, expensive and so lost out to MS...DR had MP/M-80 on bank-switched 8-bit systems: Grey Matter was using one into the 90s. CP/M-86 was the analogue of CP/M-80, CCP/M-86 was to CP/M-86 what MP/M-80 was to CP/M-80. One interesting distinction though was ( ... )
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DR-DOS added more file timestamps and password protection, but the latter was a very weak "security by obscurity".
/However/, one of the things that mitigated against DOS being used as a TCP/IP client was that while all the stacks (or at least the ones I've looked at) had APIs that were broadly based on Berkeley Sockets their actual binary calling conventions were completely different... and by that I mean that WGfD and the DOS clients that came with NT and OS/2, not to mention the DOS API in WfWG and definitely not to mention the stacks from FTP Software and the rest completely lacked binary compatibility.
On the server side, DOS would have been problematic due to limited (documented) multitasking: it was difficult to set up a thread to wait for activity on a specified port or socket.
MarkMLl
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