On Sat, 19 Oct 2024 at 23:45, G.W. Haywood via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > What would be the point? DOS introduced the idea of packaged software > to the world
I'd argue that was CP/M in the previous decade (the 1970s). I own packaged CP/M software, bought used (I am old but not that old) but it was off-the-shelf once. > without that packaged software, DOS is more or less > useless. True! > Even if one day some version of DOS does run directly on ARM, > none of the packaged software ever will. This is true. For fairness I should mention the closest thing to a non-x86 DOS: Atari GEMDOS on the Atari ST family. GEMDOS was a very basic single-user OS based on CP/M-68K and what would later become DR-DOS. However it shipped without a command line interpreter because the machines had the GEM GUI in ROM, and were GUI-only. There is a modern FOSS re-implementation, called EmuTOS. https://emutos.sourceforge.io/ It's worth saying, though, that CP/M-68K was a bit of a commercial flop, as were other non-8080 (or maybe more to the point non-Z80) forms of CP/M (CP/M-86, CP/M-8000) -- because as you say no existing apps worked. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven IoM: (+44) 7624 227612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884 Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
