Re:Life before the web – Running a Startup in the 1980's
by TMWNN on Saturday May 17, 2025 @02:23PM
(#44016053)
> We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M
A very unusual case of a company explicitly deprecating its own proprietary OS, and shifting to an external standard, on the same hardware. Tandy giving existing Model 16 customers Xenix and shipping it with new units is the only other case I can think of offhand.
What do you think of this 1983 ACM paper comparing HDOS and CP/M? <http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/358070/p188-pechura.p...>
Re:Life before the web – Running a Startup in the 1980's
by badc0ffee on Sunday May 18, 2025 @12:05AM
(#44018932)
Did IBM do this with OS/2 as well?
Re:Life before the web – Running a Startup in the 1980's
by TMWNN on Sunday May 18, 2025 @12:10AM
(#44018949)
IBM did give up on marketing OS/2 by the late 1990s (and the PC division arguably did so around the time Windows 95 came out), but I am not aware of IBM explicitly telling new and existing customers that Windows is the way forward.
A slightly different way of answering your question is that sometime after the PS/2's launch, IBM began explicitly noting that its software and peripherals were compatible with non-IBM computers. PC DOS 5.0 might have been the first. <https://np.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1jleun5/ni...>
We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M and MS-DOS but never shipped a product for MS Windows. We almost had a product ready in 1996 but then MS "upgraded" VB 3 to VB 4 and we started a rewrite, almost completed just in time for the "upgrade" to VB 5 - by which time our market had moved on.
It was a fun time to build custom and specialized hardware and software.