Hello Liam,
All right, I have to concede that point.
Thank you --- glad we could agree. :-)
I still maintain there is a bit of a difference between copying a rival's API in order to launch a competing product, and copying a rival's API in order to do something completely different with it.
Personally I am not very sure that the original purveyors of QDOS or MS-DOS 1.x intended for their offerings to "compete" head-on with CP-M/86. Perhaps this question is best left to the academic historians. According to Paterson (the author of QDOS) himself (http://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/2007/09/design-of-dos.html), "We knew Digital Research was working on a 16-bit OS, CP/M-86. At one point we were expecting it to be available at the end of 1979. Had it made its debut at any time before DOS was working, the DOS project would have been dropped. SCP [Seattle Computer Products] wanted to be a hardware company, not a software company." And according to the mainstream account (?), CP/M-86 would not be released until late 1981. QDOS was released earlier, in mid-1980 (https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1980-08/1980_08_BYTE_05-08_The_Forth_Language#page/n173/mode/2up). QDOS's system call interface (`call 5') was in fact based on that of the _8O8O_ version of CP/M, while CP/M-86 decided instead to implement a different syscall interface (`int 0xe0'). Thank you! -- https://gitlab.com/tkchia :: https://gitlab.com/tkchia _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
