Baslinux mailing list

[Karolis Lyvens <karolisl AT gmail.com>]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 04:57:48AM +0000, Lee Forrest wrote:
> I have heard, though never verified, that the original DOS
> was actually a shoddy clone of unix, and the author(s) didn't
> want anyone to know they'd cloned unix and so introduced some
> changes to make it seem different.

In fact, QDOS, which was later bought by M$ for 50000$, was an 8086
imitation of Digital Research's CP/M. Not UNIX. But, later, according to
http://web.archive.org/web/20060516105232/http://www.robotwisdom.com/linux/nonnix.html
:

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1983: Mar (09Apr?): MS-DOS 2.0 rewritten from scratch, copies Unix
directory structure but reverses slashes because forward-slashes were
already used. Copies Unix surface w/o understanding logic
-----

And, according to
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.advocacy/browse_thread/thread/868321795bef3b3b/be1e967575182546?#be1e967575182546
:

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As I remember, the first MS-DOS didn't have the concept of directory
trees, just like CP/M (which was another major "inspiration" of
MS-DOS). It wasn't until DOS 2.0 or so till "directories" came to be.
This is also true of using the "|" to pipe output of one command into
another.
-----

I disagree with the "some changes to make it seem different" part -
Yes, DOS borrowed some UNIX features, but it did MANY things different
(actually, the UNIX-DOS similarity is only on the surface): for example,
UNIX abstracted hardware from software; DOS programs interacted directly
with BIOS and/or hardware. UNIX was multiuser; DOS was overally simple
and singleuser. UNIX was multitasking; DOS was single tasking (yes,
you can run several programs, but DOS wasn't designed to do that). UNIX
was designed to run on mainframes/minicomputers; DOS was designed to
run on microcomputers (8086/8088's at first, and i think that MS-DOS
preserved this compatibility till 6.22 (last DOS version before Win95
and the stripped down MS-DOS 7 (even FreeDOS, which was released several
months ago, preserves this compatibility))

Yes, it seems that DOS family is inferior to UNIX family: singletasking,
single user, etc. But it has it's niche - it runs on pre-386 systems;
there are lots of DOS programs; it is fun to explore it (in the way that
you access the hardware manually, without help of DOS itself (One thing
that i find interesting in DOS))

Modern (especially open source) applications still are being ported
to it. DOS is NOT dead. It is still being developed - take a look at
FreeDOS project.

Besides, FreeDOS is licensed under GNU GPL, so you won't get a feeling
of running proprietary software :)

> Like \ instead of / to indicate directories, which had some
> adverse effects on the OS's functionality.

Yes, there would be a lot less confusion if this thing wasn't introduced.

> Ron said bash has been ported to DOS, and that wouldn't be
> possible if the kernels weren't very similar, too.

DOS is a _completely_ different OS in kernel structure. And porting of
many *nix utilities was made possible by the port of gcc to dos - DJGPP:

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http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/
-----

Karolis