Comment by beej71
1 month ago
> 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.
What were the "so many better options" during that period? Have we found the only remaining CP/M fan?
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.
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).
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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).
OTOH, I learned a hell of a lot about microprocessor internals by using POKE.
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.
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