... and msdos/pcdos was cp/m with the "Digital Research" crossed out and "Copyright Microsoft" and "copyright IBM" penciled in (digitally).

There was some stuff in the core msdos code that Gary Kildall challenged Microsoft or anyone else to reveal whats it's purpose was - seeings that he wrote it he was one of the few (or only one) who actually knew what thats code was doing there.

Microsoft/IBM theft of CP/M is one of those things that just beggers belief. Especially as it was what propelled Bill Gates to become the richest man on the planet also. <shakesheadindisbelief>

... btw you do know that CP/M and the whole digital research catalouge of 8bit (16?) is released under an almost BSD type license now right?

CP/M was spun off to a couple of different firms and eventually the CEO of (caldera i think) the compnay who owns it now, posted on one of the biggest CP/M repositories on the net (Gaby Choudry's CP/M site) saying basically they could let people have it.

yea, used GEM on the XT with Hercules monocrome Amber graphics :-]

I always liked running GEM / DR DOS instead of Win 3 or 3.11 back in the day.  Especially when they added multi-tasking to the mix.  Too bad DR DOS lost the fight.

I would probably use GEM as my day to day window manager in X if someone wrote one.  I suppose I could give Amiwm a spin:

http://umlautllama.com/projects/amiwm/

Close, but not quite.

btw GEM is released as a GPL application, and is revived for modern computers with variuos versions. OPENGEM is  used as the default GUI for FreeDOS on PC's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGEM

I have used it on freeDOS in the past, and it is a bit clunky by modern standards but does the job.

Sat Dec 20 2014 11:58:25 AM EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Hey, you're close anyway ... today's "flat" UI designs look a lot like those of 30 years ago, back when that's all the hardware could handle.

(True Real Actual Fact: the Windows 2012 UI was written in Athena Widgets)

I would believe it if I tried :-)  I just think they need to hire a < 60 y.o. UI designer to re-write the gui stack in JavaScript to do a better job.

Sun Dec 21 2014 05:22:51 PM ESTfrom mo

btw GEM is released as a GPL application, and is revived for modern computers with variuos versions. OPENGEM is  used as the default GUI for FreeDOS on PC's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGEM

I have used it on freeDOS in the past, and it is a bit clunky by modern standards but does the job.

 

No arguments there, gets the job done  and is a proper GUI, unlike the dos 3 stuff .  It is lightning quick too and does everything it should. "Clunky" was a wrong word, i should have used, "plain" or "simple" maybe?  Very usable.

This sounds a lot like the choruses of OS/2 users who were trying to get IBM to open source its desktop.

I kinda miss Warp.  The one and only time I used IBM support.  The call lasted about 5 minutes, and most of that was to reset my bios to default so the installer would work.  Once loaded, that was a rock solid OS.  Even ran some simple Win 3.1 stuff under it.  Good for multitasking on what would be considered weak hardware today.

otoh programming on it was a mess. it suffered from several bugs caused by not setting defaults like the other ms stuff did. Getting the right screen resolution also a mess. fixing it once it wouldn't boot anymore - also a mess.

No comparison at all to linux, which was designed to be usable without GUI from the very beginning.

getting the A80 running... finally

https://www.arangodb.com/2015/05/merii-hummingbird-a80-optimus-cluster/

Thishasn'tbeenagoodweekendforyou.