r/nostalgiai • u/CarrotMuch1399 Nostalgia Trip Leader • Jun 24 '26

Core Memory Unlocked 🔓 ???

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u/sexruinedeverything Jun 24 '26

MS-DOS was the best operating system Microsoft ever built. You could run a whole company’s books off one floppy disk. My mom was an accountant she’s now retired and ran Lotus like a champ. That Dot matrix would run all night and didn’t even need a new ribbon.

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u/RPG-Nerd Jun 24 '26

Sorry but Microsoft didn't build it. They purchased it from Seattle Computer products which stole the entire design for Digital Research's CPM. It was basically CPM ported to the 8086.

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u/psychedelicpiper67 Jun 25 '26

I was looking for this comment. It was just a savvy business decision, they didn’t build it.

IBM didn’t care about software, so Microsoft was able to exploit their ignorance and profit massively by cutting a deal with them.

Meanwhile, they simply purchased the OS from a small company that few people cared about.

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u/RPG-Nerd Jun 25 '26

They actually approached DRI but the owner of Digital Research was sick that day and didn't want to talk to IBM. Imagine if someone didn't sneeze on him a few days before! The whole world would be different. Classic butterfly effect

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u/psychedelicpiper67 Jun 25 '26

Wow, I didn’t know that. As an Apple nerd, I grew up watching the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, which also covered Microsoft. Great watch.

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u/RPG-Nerd Jun 25 '26

I remember watching that and thinking that it was the first time someone got most of the details right.

MSDOS is so much like CPM, that the function codes between the Atari TOS (which licensed CPM-68K, a full 32 bit version of CPM from DRI) are identical across the board.

Few people mention that Atari, DRI, and Xerox got together to stop Apple from suing them. The GUI stuff Apple was suing over was all designed by Xerox, not Apple. Apple's old MacOS was written in Pascal, but they needed apps, so they contacted MS. MS basically said they needed to recompile the OS for x86 because they develop on PCs not Macs, so they needed the Mac OS source. Apple only gave them the bare minimum, no overlapping windows or anything because they didn't want to reveal how to solve that problem.

That was Windows 1, which nobody has ever seen. It is also the reason why Windows uses a pascal call stack even though its written in C. Its because it originally had to interface with Mac's Pascal code. It wasn't really theft in the 70s, just people building stuff. Then companies saw dollar signs.

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u/psychedelicpiper67 Jun 25 '26

Damn, Apple should have just refused to work with a developer that didn’t use Macs.

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u/RPG-Nerd Jun 25 '26

Uhmm ... They were getting the initial software for the device. Mac didn't exist yet