On Sun, 10 May 2009 23:35:41 +0200, noname wrote:

"Ralph Mowery" wrote:

Microsoft got so big the same way Walmart did. They put out a
cheeper product.

What cheaper product was that? After CP/M and similar OS's died
decades ago, the earlier PC-DOS and later Windows were the only
commercially distributed OS's available unbundled from hardware.

SCO Xenix. Microsoft started Xenix *BEFORE* IBM arrived and bought MS
BASIC. IBM wanted an operating system, so Bill Gates sent them to DRI
for CP/M. When IBM and DRI couldn't agree on anything, IBM came back
to Bill Gates. Bill knew that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer
Products had something called Q-DOS (quick and dirty operating
system). QDOS was suppose to be a temporary kludge while waiting for
DRI to deliver CP/M-86. PCDOS grew so quickly, the Xenix was put on
the back burner for a while. Eventually, Xenix was licensed to SCO,
IBM, and others. It was far more expensive than PCDOS or MSDOS but
also far more useful and reliable. For example, Xenix had support for
RAM above 1MByte, long before EMS/XMS arrived for PC-DOS. I still
have customers running SCO Xenix 2.3.4. Xenix also had a rather
fanatically loyal following. When SCO tried to promote Open Desktop
as a Xenix replacement and proceeded to try and kill Xenix, the
dealers almost rebelled. It took over 10 years for Xenix to fade
away, mostly because of simple neglect.

There were plenty of other Unix v.7 ports by other companies at the
time (long before Linux).
http://www.levenez.com/unix/
For example, IBM and DEC both sold Venix on their low end hardware in
1984.

There were also a mess of general purpose non-Unix and non-DOS
operating systems (not tied to hardware) released over the years.
Minix, GEM, GEOS, QNX, Netware, OS/2 are the ones I can recall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_systems_timeline
Most of the general purpose OS's were roughly in the same price range
as MSDOS. Therefore, price was not a major factor in their demise.


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Jeff Liebermann
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