Talk:DR-DOS

"In the fall of 1991 Microsoft announced Windows 3.1 and made it clear that it would not run on DR-DOS. They also refused to give copies of the beta of 3.1 to Novell, who now owned DR-DOS. At the same time they changed their licensing on DOS to charge for it on every machine companies sold, whether or not it was installed."

Quite right, JulianD The above (which I have struck out) is nonsense. Tannin 07:25, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'd have to check this, but I am pretty sure that the every-machine licencing scheme came a long time earlier than this, in fact I think it was there right from the start. Anyone have confirmation handy?

In 2002, DR-DOS was sold to a little company called DeviceLogics... DR-DOS was eventually sold to Lineo...

So which is it... I looked at drdos.com and it's a DeviceLogics page. -- JulianD 2004-06-17 1:09 am

In what ways was QDOS "legally questionable"? 213.84.239.37 17:46, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

RE: QDOS - I think the article is a little misleading here. From what I have been able to gather, SCP had a license from DRI for QDOS, which meant that QDOS itself was legal. What was NOT legal was that Bill Gates bought QDOS from SCP. Having entered into a contract with IBM, with no disk operating system at all, Microsoft had to do something very quickly. They bought QDOS, spent a hectic few days rewriting the code, and renamed it MS-DOS. I have heard it said that if one digs deep enough into the original MS-DOS code, there are still Digital Research copyright messages that Microsoft missed.

The fact is that there is very little difference between CP/M and MS-DOS 1. Microsoft basically stole the disk operating system that made them the world leader. Gary Kildall refused to sue MS for this, but reportedly was devastated over it and carried the bitterness the rest of his life.

As for the article being non neutral, I am quite familiar with the subject, and I didn't see anything in it that is incorrect or biased toward DRI. The only thing giving this impression is the author's usage of terms like "very," ie: "very advanced memory management," et al. However, the author is also frank about the later failure of DRI products. Elaich 16:40, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

What was illegal about Microsoft's actions wrt buying QDOS? You may call it "dodgey" that they didn't tell SCP they were going to license it to IBM, I call it good business. Sophistifunk

Years ago I had access to the early MS-DOS code and certainly do not recall ever seeing any DR copyright messages in there.Chenab 11:10, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

...often pronounced "Doctor DOS" by its users...

I do not think that the DR-DOS users themselves ever used the name "Doctor DOS" for DR-DOS since they know that it means Digital Research Disk Operating System. AFAIK the name "Doctor DOS" was used derisively by Microsoft, perhaps later also by users of MS-DOS.

GEMDOS

A paragraph on GEMDOS (which appears to be the M86K port for DR-DOS, used for the Atari ST) might be of use. (I wouldn't know what to write, though.) --StuartBrady (Talk) 01:27, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Confusing statement.

I really can't understand the next statement:

"So much, in fact, that some programs would fail to load as they started "impossibly" low in memory – inside the first 64KB."

Anyone have a clue ? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Muttley.meen (talk • contribs) 13:56, 17 January 2007 (UTC).

I'm having to think back now as it is years since I wrote code in that kind of environment. It is to do with memory addressing and the way you could do it with a 8086 and related processors. You could use a short address which could access 64k or a longer form which went across page boundaries (e.g. multiples of 64k). So either a program is finding itself split across a page boundary and so can't access half of its data or, for some reason someone had assumed they would never be loaded below 64k and did something wrong but can't think why or what. The 64k situation also impacted on program extensions. COM files were executables less than 64k if bigger then they had to be EXEs.

There was at least one way in which DRDOS was not totally compatible with MSDOS and that was in memory allocation. DRDOS returned the memory block as was rather than clearing the contents to zeroes as it should have done to be totally correct. Chenab 11:08, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Couple of benifical links related to dr dos

[1] and [2] Mathmo ^Talk 23:51, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

DR Dobbs Article and Windows 3.1 and 3.11 warning

I remember reading the linked article in Dr. Dobbs magazine, and re-read it. MS did NOT remove the warning in Windows 3.1 "The message first appeared in build 61, a late-stage beta, and seemed to disappear in the final retail release of Windows 3.1. However, the code that generates the message is present in the retail release, albeit in quiescent form, and executes every time you run Windows 3.1." http://www.ddj.com/windows/184409070;jsessionid=XIJBFL244QGY0QSNDLRSKHSCJUNN2JVN?pgno=4 Page 4 is actual article text, previous pages are screenshots.

I believe the warning was back fully in Windows 3.11 and was the only detectable difference I ever found between versions 3.1 and 3.11 Cuvtixo 18:15, 21 August 2007 (UTC)