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Comment by beej71 | Hacker News Reader

> They seem to have a personal vendetta against Microsoft

Probably because they were forced to use MS-DOS when so many better options were killed off by Microsoft's monopolistic and anti-consumer underhanded business tactics...

I might be projecting.

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What were the "so many better options" during that period? Have we found the only remaining CP/M fan?

a bit later, but not much: OS/2

The fizzling of OS/2 was as much IBM's fault as anything. If they'd paid more attention to it sooner, MS might never have shipped Windows; they'd just have made their office applications OS/2 GUI programs. But IBM was too fixated on its mainframes to realize that they were giving away the PC market to MS (again--they did it the first time by licensing DOS to MS).

Before Facebook, I used Friendster. Years later, I read how Friendster execs were too busy patting themselves on the back and flying around on private jets to get around to fixing the horrendous site lag of sometimes a minute to even sign into the web app. How could a company's leadership be so foolish? I understood this paled in comparison to the doomed arrogance of IBM's leaders when I read stories about IBM's downfall in the delightful book In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters.

Wait, did IBM license DOS to Microsoft? I thought IBM was looking for an operating system for the PC and approached Kildall about CP/M. That deal fell through, so they approached Microsoft. Gates didn't have anything, so he licensed QDOS for a song and licensed it to IBM.

I was being somewhat sloppy. IBM bought DOS from Microsoft for the IBM PC--but neglected to buy exclusive rights to it, so Microsoft could and did sell it on its own as MS-DOS. (And later, other vendors began selling their own versions.) For PC users, this was a great deal, since it effectively made the IBM PC an open standard. But it meant that IBM captured much less value from DOS and PCs than Microsoft did.

OS/2 and DR-DOS are a couple examples. But what really gets me is the whole Xenix thing.

CP/M was great on Z80 systems. But a 386 was capable of so much more.

I was forced to use ms basic on my c64. Never forgive, never forget.

I always found it weird to ship a BASIC interpreter that didn't have specialised commands (unless you count POKE) to access the graphics and sound capabilities of a computer like the C64. Some computers of the same era had vastly superior BASICs (such as Sinclair BASIC).

I agree, it seems very low-effort on Commodore's part to license this lowest-common-denominator BASIC with no support for graphics and sound other than POKE. Super lame, but they got away with it.

No they didn’t. If they had, I would be typing this on my Commodore phone.

OTOH, I learned a hell of a lot about microprocessor internals by using POKE.

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