Opportunities and Operating Systems [Previous ¦ Next]
August saw the launch of IBM’s PC, primitive as it was with 64 Kb RAM and no floppy disk! The operating system, PC-DOS that became MS-DOS outside IBM, was however on a roll (as was the IBM PC whose open specs fostered a hardware aftermarket that made all the difference with respect to Apple, that remained proprietary). How ironic then, that despite Apple and Unix launching the windowing desktop from Xerox, it was Microsoft Windows based on DOS that took over the desktop a decade later...
That summer I was in grad school, still boot-strapping a mainframe word processor with 8 in. diskettes; I remember learning to back up files early on, since an as-yet-unknown keystroke combination sorted my thesis alphabetically: and did it ever do it fast too… talk about “zero to dumb in under one second”!
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