[rescue] AT&T 3b1 Starlan software

[James Lockwood]

On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:

> On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Jeffrey Nonken wrote:
>
> > That's IBM arrogance at work. They called their operating system OS, for
> > Operating System, their disk operating system DOS, and later their personal
> > computer PC. As if there were no others.
>
> Nope, that is IBM piss poor branding department. and DOS was an earlier OS
> that was actually bought by M$... IBM never branded that product except
> for the IBM-DOS or PC-DOS, but that was because they had to keep up with
> MS-DOS branding. :)

You're being PC-centric.  Jeffrey is referring to the original DOS.  This
was forked off of BOS/360, along with TOS (unimaginatively named for "Tape
Operating System").  It eventually spawned VSE/SP and VSE/ESA ("Virtual
Storage Extended").  Another fork in the OS evolutionary tree lead to MFT,
MVT, and eventually to MVS and OS/390.

It could run in 16 kilowords on machines with pathetically low memory
bandwidth by modern standards.  Not bad for 1960's technology.

> It had its faults, but then there are no perfect systems anyway. But for
> that time, the PC was a darn good design!

It wasn't as screwy as the bitty micros (Apple II, C64, etc) but there
were still lots of places where they made some bizarre decisions to cut
costs.  I want to know what the engineer who came up with the IBM PC A20
handling was on at the time.  The ISA bus is a magnificent example of bad
design.  Positive active TTL signals?  Positive edge-triggered interrupts?
Arggggggh.

I just wish that DEC had promoted the Professional line more heavily, they
had a real gem there that just needed polishing.

-James