Text 56160, 63 rader
Skriven 2009-07-30 23:31:51 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 56158 av ED VANCE (1:123/140)
Ärende: C= again.
=================
ED VANCE -> JEAN PARROT wrote:
 JP>> Ed wrote:

 EV>>> Didn't the Evil Empire at Redmond write the early OS for Macs for
 EV>>> Apple???

 JP>> Apple ( McIntosh ) is in CA, not WA. They also wrote for the C=,
 EV> Multiplan
 JP>> used it for a long while.

 JP>> I am sure that it was not written exclusively for the C=, just
 EV> ported over.

 EV> Jean,

 EV> I've used the Multiplan version for the Commodore C=64 long ago.

The late 70's personal computer market was fragmented between many incompatible
platforms- Apple II, Commodore=64, and a bunch of more or less compatible CP/M
systems among others... Microsoft very quickly built a strategy of producing a
few products- MS BASIC, Multiplan, etc, and producing versions for as wide a
range of platforms as they could... when the IBM PC was released (1981), they
were first approached by IBM to provide BASIC for that platform... with that
foot in the door, they also pitched an operating system (that didn't exist at
the time)... the rest is history.

When the IBM PC was announced, so-called IBM-DOS (produced by MS) was only one
of 3 operating systems announced for the platform- the others were a version of
CP/M and a Pascal-based system. IBM-DOS ended up the de facto standard, at
least in part because it was ready on release day and it was priced cheaper
than the other two. (The IBM PC could be purchased with no operating systems
since it has (MS licensed) BASIC in ROM; with no OS floppy disk inserted, it
booted to a so-called BASIC-A interpreter, letting users type in their own
program code in BASIC.

While some hobbyists did that, using pre-compiled programs requiring IBM DOS
became far more popular.

(Similarly, when Apple was developing the Macintosh, they encouraged MS to port
MS BASIC and Multiplan to that new platform, so that they could say that
'standard' 3rd party software was available for the platform from day 1. MS
BASIC for Mac was pretty odd, since it didn't make use of the Mac's GUI, but
allowed users to create standard text-mode BASIC programs in a window on the
Mac's screen.

I actually used the somewhat later MS GW-BASIC for Mac to write a text mode BBS
emulator for my school district, to allow Mac-using schools with limited modem
access to show students what the school district's BBS was like. I also made a
DOS version, which (amazingly!) runs fine under Windows and can be downloaded
from:

http://www.zisman.ca/files/Ed-net.exe

(should anyone be interested!)).

-- 
==================================
- email: alan (at) zisman (dot) ca
- website: http://www.zisman.ca
(running on Mac OS X)

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