I had a German doctoral student as a roommate who, halfway through his dissertation research and beginnings of writing, handed me his laptop and said “Put Linux on it.” That spirit you mention exists in him too :) Though the timing was a little scary…
I was born in 92, so I wasn't able to live in these times where CPM was actually king. However, I used it on my mother's C128. And later, I watched every available Computer Chronicles episode. I certainly think he did a lot for the computers we use. Really a shame. RIP Gary.
Lol, I was almost saying "nice when the young generation is into retro", then doing the math .... mumble muble... 1992, that makes you 32 today :-) So absolutely no offense meant. While I can't show off CP/M on a C128, my next episode Sunday in a week is about Commdore and CP/M actually, albeit running on the earlier C64.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR yeah, we're all old, time passes by really fast! No worries about the CPM on a C128, I certainly don't recall anything about it!
Didn't help that IBM kept on insisting theirs was "PC-DOS" even though after Compaq and Phoenix BIOS, every "MS-DOS" was 99% the same as PC-DOS. Therefore "Clones". People stopped paying attention to the first two letters, even when they were "DR"
Same. After around the PS/2 when IBM's new system architecture flopped and clones became more common than IBMs, the 2 real DOS choices were MS-DOS and DR-DOS. And both of them sound like titles: Ms. and Dr. So they got pronounced as such.
I worked a lot with Concurrent DOS 386 (which BTW still could work with CP/M media) in the late 80's and saw DR-DOS as simplified, single tasking, single user version of Concurrent DOS.
Excellent! A well researched history with bits I didn't know about. I used DR-DOS in preference to MS/PC DOS for years as I couldn't forgive M$ for their anti-competitive business practices at the time. Sadly missed - but I still have all the manuals and install floppies from almost every version mentioned here. Great!
Great video, a lot of interesting information. I was always curious why Vobis tried to sell all these strange things like DR DOS, OS/2 and Alpha PC. BTW, you can not reach Gary anymore, but maybe Ken Thompson can be interesting interlecutor ;)
I got DR DOS 6 when it first came out and loved it. I didn't switch to MSDOS 6.22 until Widows 95 was about to release, and only because I got it for free from my boss at the local computer store.
also the fact that generic "Disk Operating System" became synonymous with operating system as in the sense of "Unix". It was supposed to just work on (magnetic memory) disks, remember?
Used Novell DOS back then (which comes through my father). I still can remember having this huge manual for Novell DOS which I read at all occasions. There was a time, where my father was very enthusiastic about using non-Microsoft stuff. Novell and later OS/2, StarOffice and such. I remember there was even a very simple game included with Novell DOS, Netwars, which you could could also play on network (some kind of a very simple spaceship simulator).
Vobis. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a looooooong long time. A long time. Many '90s childhood memories just came flooding back at the sight of that logo.
DR DOS Release 6.0 Copyright (c) 1976,1982,1988,1990,1991 Digital Research Inc. All Rights Reserved Clearly, DR-DOS was perceived by Bill Gates and Steve Balmer as a threat to Microsoft, to the point of making the company's software falsely incompatible with it. A detestable anti-competitive method. It's amusing to note that in 1991, a young Finnish student reported that he had started writing a monolithic Unix-like kernel published under a free license, which would later become Microsoft's nightmare and an existential threat to the company.
I was one of these „vobis driven“ users of DR DOS back in the days. It was the better alternative, but already then MS torpedoed the OS by claiming they had exclusive rights on drivers for upper and hi memory. So DR had to rename himem.sys and emm386 to other names, just to make the use of DR DOS inconvenient, as MS thought. WTF, I thought, and stuck to DR DOS. I kept being a DR aficionado, but then Win 95 came in…
Apparently some had commented on my previous episode already, that "Doctor" also used to some extend in english speaking regions. One former Digital Research employee also commented here and confirmed the intended way was to say D-R.
Great research piece. Win NT made networking easy. Dirty pool by MS though. They copped a fine but look at where they are now. That fine was money well spent.
they somehow basically bought the UNIX network stack with the NDIS6 module for Win NT. (windows is still more compatible with Unix networking to this day, its just not POSIX that predates POSIX specifying networking, which is why Linux is incompatible and people complain)
We ran DR DOS at home instead of MS-DOS. Being able to multitask on it was so mindblowing to my child brain and when my grandpa finally got windows 3.x to run on ot it was egen better. Good times. My 486 is still running DR DOS
I loved DR DOS but when i tried installing win3.1 on it, the setup just showed a black screen after a while which made installing it impossible. Had to switch to ms dos. I thought it was a compatibility issue, now it seems it could've been intentional sabotage by ms
3:00 wait when did Digital Research dominate the computer industry? Definitely not in the personal computer (PC) market. Oh I guess they developed CP/M which wasn't what I was into at the time.
As you noted yourself, CP/M was there before the PC. It was Digital Research's go-to product, and the defacto standard operating systems for microcomputers since its introduction in 1974. That statement of mine is to be seen exactly in that context. And as part of that history, the computing industry does not define itself just as being only the "PC market". Could it be you missed to watch part 1 of this mini-series, As that's all explained in my earlier video?
CP/M was available for almost every 8080, Z80 microcomputer, even before IBM made the IBM PC: Amstrad's CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 128. I used it in as late as 1990.
Certainly up to 1980. Gary had three years to port CPM to 8086 and he could have done a deal with IBM. He thought everyone should do what he wanted, when he wanted.
@@zekicayall of those machines you listed, came out after the IBM PC. When the commodore 64 launched in 1982, you could still buy an IBM PC with 16k of ram and the highest specification was the same 64k as the c64
Well, Swiss german is a dialect. Most people in the german area speak dialects, which are divided in low alemannic, high alemannic and highest alemannic. They're all similar, so one can understand those dialects to a certain degree, although there will be words used differently, or unknown words you really have to know. I found a nice video, this should help a little bit to get the difference between High german and some Swiss dialect: th-cam.com/video/89adaKKIkUw/w-d-xo.html
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR oooh. I watched the video. Very interesting. Swiss German sounds so…weird lol. It sounds completely different than High German! Also, I’m going to have to check out this channel lol. I’ve been doing my best to learn (high) German, but having more things to listen to or practice with is better. :)
To me, it doesn't really matter. They all had their strengths and weaknesses, some are more compatible for one thing, some are for another. As a matter of preference, for me, it is MS-DOS 6, PC DOS 5, but some obscure reason NOT MS-DOS 5, although that's practically the same, and PC-DOS 3.31. I don't like DR DOS 6 for some "stomach feeling" reason, but 3.x and 5 are ok, and I really like Novell DOS/DR-DOS 7 a lot! FreeDOS as awesome as for it comes with all drivers and tools, and is a most complete DOS one would propaby have dreamed of 30+ years ago. But I don't use it to often for retro systems except for certain occasions, as I prefer to put the contemporary software of the time on my systems. What I never warmed with was the russian DOS named PTS-DOS. It's superfast and supercompact, as really everything is written in assembly. But still, I never built a connection to it. Still, this is only my personal preference, and does not have anything to do with "better" or "worse".
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Thank you. I sometimes used and loved Novell DR-DOS but it was hard to get for me. But, because I mostly used MS-DOS 6.22 that I liked the most I feel IT being "The real DOS". Ofcourse, I am aware of its limitations and bugs so I use some Win98/DOS 7.1 files (himem, edit, emm386). As for freeDOS, I never felt it suitable for a real retro machine, as you said. To that, contributed some strange errors that I had on old hardware (486, P1, P2) while running old software and games. The IBM PC DOS I almost never used so I do not have a particular nostalgia about it.
In the future, maybe put a low pass filter over any audio you record around older machines. The first part of the video starting at 0:40 has an awful high pitched squeal that’s completely unbearable.
That segment actually shows DOS Plus. The clock at the bottom is a direct relic / left-over from CP/M, which introduced this status line somewhen in the beginning of the 80s. It was removed though with DR DOS 3.x.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTORstatus bars became a thing because software would only use 24 lines of text as outputting to the last character of a line would scroll the screen. Kaypro added escape sequences to their cpm bios that let you output on the last line of the screen without scrolling, and scrolling wouldn't affect the status bar. I think DR were just replicating this.
Windows 11 has a setting to enable seconds on the Taskbar clock. The Dave's Garage video doesn't apply to modern Windows as systems are fast enough with enough memory that the concerns of 90s Windows no longer applies. It is off by default because it would require more power redrawing the clock every second than every minute.Remember Windows is a graphical operating system and dos was text based. Dos can update the clock by writing about 10 bytes of ram Windows needs to load a font and render text given the user's locale settings to hundreds of full colour pixels
The thing I've always liked about Germany's relationship with technology is it's insatiable appetite for 'the alternative'.
I had a German doctoral student as a roommate who, halfway through his dissertation research and beginnings of writing, handed me his laptop and said “Put Linux on it.”
That spirit you mention exists in him too :) Though the timing was a little scary…
I was born in 92, so I wasn't able to live in these times where CPM was actually king. However, I used it on my mother's C128. And later, I watched every available Computer Chronicles episode. I certainly think he did a lot for the computers we use. Really a shame. RIP Gary.
Lol, I was almost saying "nice when the young generation is into retro", then doing the math .... mumble muble... 1992, that makes you 32 today :-)
So absolutely no offense meant.
While I can't show off CP/M on a C128, my next episode Sunday in a week is about Commdore and CP/M actually, albeit running on the earlier C64.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR yeah, we're all old, time passes by really fast! No worries about the CPM on a C128, I certainly don't recall anything about it!
Hell, in the USA, everyone I know/knew called it Doctor DOS.
Didn't help that IBM kept on insisting theirs was "PC-DOS" even though after Compaq and Phoenix BIOS, every "MS-DOS" was 99% the same as PC-DOS. Therefore "Clones". People stopped paying attention to the first two letters, even when they were "DR"
Same. After around the PS/2 when IBM's new system architecture flopped and clones became more common than IBMs, the 2 real DOS choices were MS-DOS and DR-DOS. And both of them sound like titles: Ms. and Dr. So they got pronounced as such.
I worked a lot with Concurrent DOS 386 (which BTW still could work with CP/M media) in the late 80's and saw DR-DOS as simplified, single tasking, single user version of Concurrent DOS.
Excellent! A well researched history with bits I didn't know about. I used DR-DOS in preference to MS/PC DOS for years as I couldn't forgive M$ for their anti-competitive business practices at the time. Sadly missed - but I still have all the manuals and install floppies from almost every version mentioned here. Great!
Great video, a lot of interesting information. I was always curious why Vobis tried to sell all these strange things like DR DOS, OS/2 and Alpha PC. BTW, you can not reach Gary anymore, but maybe Ken Thompson can be interesting interlecutor ;)
I got DR DOS 6 when it first came out and loved it. I didn't switch to MSDOS 6.22 until Widows 95 was about to release, and only because I got it for free from my boss at the local computer store.
don't think this was an accident not foreseen by Bill Gates.
"how many different product name brands do you want to stick on your DOS product tree?" - "yes!"
also the fact that generic "Disk Operating System" became synonymous with operating system as in the sense of "Unix". It was supposed to just work on (magnetic memory) disks, remember?
Used Novell DOS back then (which comes through my father). I still can remember having this huge manual for Novell DOS which I read at all occasions. There was a time, where my father was very enthusiastic about using non-Microsoft stuff. Novell and later OS/2, StarOffice and such. I remember there was even a very simple game included with Novell DOS, Netwars, which you could could also play on network (some kind of a very simple spaceship simulator).
There's a "D" in Caldera.. it's not "Calera" it's "Cal-dare-ah" which is a reference to the inside of volcanoes.
Yeah, it seems this nuance is being lost or easily overheard because of the background music. I'm definitely pronouncing it with a soft D.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTORI hear the soft d in there. Just not super common to american ears
Appreciate the insights and history behind the different versions of CP/M and progression to DR DOS, great videos :)
Vobis. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a looooooong long time. A long time. Many '90s childhood memories just came flooding back at the sight of that logo.
What memories? I'm curious. Tell me! ^^
DR DOS Release 6.0
Copyright (c) 1976,1982,1988,1990,1991 Digital Research Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Clearly, DR-DOS was perceived by Bill Gates and Steve Balmer as a threat to Microsoft, to the point of making the company's software falsely incompatible with it. A detestable anti-competitive method.
It's amusing to note that in 1991, a young Finnish student reported that he had started writing a monolithic Unix-like kernel published under a free license, which would later become Microsoft's nightmare and an existential threat to the company.
And that thing it's still running hot after more than 30 years, and has to some extend now found its way into Windows as well ^^
I was one of these „vobis driven“ users of DR DOS back in the days. It was the better alternative, but already then MS torpedoed the OS by claiming they had exclusive rights on drivers for upper and hi memory. So DR had to rename himem.sys and emm386 to other names, just to make the use of DR DOS inconvenient, as MS thought. WTF, I thought, and stuck to DR DOS. I kept being a DR aficionado, but then Win 95 came in…
Calling it "Doctor DOS" was common in the United States too. Funny in a way, we always said the letters M-S and then DOS instead of "Miss DOS".
I think the hyphen helps a lot! MS-DOS (with a hyphen) versus DR DOS (without a hyphen until the last versions.)
Apparently some had commented on my previous episode already, that "Doctor" also used to some extend in english speaking regions.
One former Digital Research employee also commented here and confirmed the intended way was to say D-R.
Miss DOS! You made my day!
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Situation in Poland: I know maybe 4 person who knows what DR DOS was and I'm pretty sure all of them will say: Doctor DOS
@@SobieRobie How else would you play Miss Pacman? LOL
Another great video and fascinating chap. Thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it
Well in the meeting with IBM as Tom Rolander says dri suggest a multitasking operating system.
Great research piece. Win NT made networking easy. Dirty pool by MS though. They copped a fine but look at where they are now. That fine was money well spent.
they somehow basically bought the UNIX network stack with the NDIS6 module for Win NT. (windows is still more compatible with Unix networking to this day, its just not POSIX that predates POSIX specifying networking, which is why Linux is incompatible and people complain)
We ran DR DOS at home instead of MS-DOS. Being able to multitask on it was so mindblowing to my child brain and when my grandpa finally got windows 3.x to run on ot it was egen better. Good times. My 486 is still running DR DOS
vindicating to see microsofts kinda always engaged in shady tactics with competitors like this
I loved DR DOS but when i tried installing win3.1 on it, the setup just showed a black screen after a while which made installing it impossible. Had to switch to ms dos. I thought it was a compatibility issue, now it seems it could've been intentional sabotage by ms
3:00 wait when did Digital Research dominate the computer industry? Definitely not in the personal computer (PC) market.
Oh I guess they developed CP/M which wasn't what I was into at the time.
As you noted yourself, CP/M was there before the PC. It was Digital Research's go-to product, and the defacto standard operating systems for microcomputers since its introduction in 1974.
That statement of mine is to be seen exactly in that context. And as part of that history, the computing industry does not define itself just as being only the "PC market".
Could it be you missed to watch part 1 of this mini-series, As that's all explained in my earlier video?
CP/M was available for almost every 8080, Z80 microcomputer, even before IBM made the IBM PC: Amstrad's CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 128. I used it in as late as 1990.
Certainly up to 1980. Gary had three years to port CPM to 8086 and he could have done a deal with IBM. He thought everyone should do what he wanted, when he wanted.
@@zekicayall of those machines you listed, came out after the IBM PC. When the commodore 64 launched in 1982, you could still buy an IBM PC with 16k of ram and the highest specification was the same 64k as the c64
I’d never heard it called Doctor DOS lol.
How different is Swiss German from “Standard” German? (Which is something I’ve been learning.)
Well, Swiss german is a dialect. Most people in the german area speak dialects, which are divided in low alemannic, high alemannic and highest alemannic.
They're all similar, so one can understand those dialects to a certain degree, although there will be words used differently, or unknown words you really have to know.
I found a nice video, this should help a little bit to get the difference between High german and some Swiss dialect:
th-cam.com/video/89adaKKIkUw/w-d-xo.html
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR ooooh! Danke! Will watch!
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR oooh. I watched the video. Very interesting. Swiss German sounds so…weird lol. It sounds completely different than High German! Also, I’m going to have to check out this channel lol. I’ve been doing my best to learn (high) German, but having more things to listen to or practice with is better. :)
So, the best DOS OS is.... MS-DOS, DR-DOS, Free-DOS, IBM PC-DOS...? And what version?
To me, it doesn't really matter. They all had their strengths and weaknesses, some are more compatible for one thing, some are for another.
As a matter of preference, for me, it is MS-DOS 6, PC DOS 5, but some obscure reason NOT MS-DOS 5, although that's practically the same, and PC-DOS 3.31.
I don't like DR DOS 6 for some "stomach feeling" reason, but 3.x and 5 are ok, and I really like Novell DOS/DR-DOS 7 a lot!
FreeDOS as awesome as for it comes with all drivers and tools, and is a most complete DOS one would propaby have dreamed of 30+ years ago.
But I don't use it to often for retro systems except for certain occasions, as I prefer to put the contemporary software of the time on my systems.
What I never warmed with was the russian DOS named PTS-DOS.
It's superfast and supercompact, as really everything is written in assembly. But still, I never built a connection to it.
Still, this is only my personal preference, and does not have anything to do with "better" or "worse".
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Thank you. I sometimes used and loved Novell DR-DOS but it was hard to get for me. But, because I mostly used MS-DOS 6.22 that I liked the most I feel IT being "The real DOS". Ofcourse, I am aware of its limitations and bugs so I use some Win98/DOS 7.1 files (himem, edit, emm386). As for freeDOS, I never felt it suitable for a real retro machine, as you said. To that, contributed some strange errors that I had on old hardware (486, P1, P2) while running old software and games.
The IBM PC DOS I almost never used so I do not have a particular nostalgia about it.
In the future, maybe put a low pass filter over any audio you record around older machines. The first part of the video starting at 0:40 has an awful high pitched squeal that’s completely unbearable.
Thanks, will consider that for upcoming videos.
I see around 1:57 that DR DOS could do a realtime clock down to the seconds, but Windows couldn't do that even to this day! (See Dave's Garage!)
That segment actually shows DOS Plus.
The clock at the bottom is a direct relic / left-over from CP/M, which introduced this status line somewhen in the beginning of the 80s.
It was removed though with DR DOS 3.x.
Windows could do it, it doesn't do it.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTORstatus bars became a thing because software would only use 24 lines of text as outputting to the last character of a line would scroll the screen. Kaypro added escape sequences to their cpm bios that let you output on the last line of the screen without scrolling, and scrolling wouldn't affect the status bar. I think DR were just replicating this.
Windows 11 has a setting to enable seconds on the Taskbar clock. The Dave's Garage video doesn't apply to modern Windows as systems are fast enough with enough memory that the concerns of 90s Windows no longer applies. It is off by default because it would require more power redrawing the clock every second than every minute.Remember Windows is a graphical operating system and dos was text based. Dos can update the clock by writing about 10 bytes of ram Windows needs to load a font and render text given the user's locale settings to hundreds of full colour pixels