My systems at that time used RS-232 to connect to the larger systems, VAX-based BSD UNIX, HP 21MX minis and a Masscomp SVR3 UNIX box. Back when I had my IMSAI 8080, my wife visited my office and I showed her "Adventure", running on a VAX 11/780. She asked if she could play
Lew Wolfgang wrote: that game on my computer. I said no, but if we had a modem... I was soon the proud owner of a 300 baud manual modem. :-)
But then came the first IBM PC and blew me out of the water. People didn't like it because it was better (it wasn't), or because it was cheaper (it wasn't), but because it was "IBM", and that brought respectability in their eyes to the industry. It was crap-assed hardware running a toy-clown operating system, and the rest is history. Harrumph!
As someone who at the time was a computer technician and also owned an IMSAI, I found a lot of technical deficiencies in the original PC. One big one was the edge triggered interrupts, which made it difficult for sharing them. Of course, PC-DOS, was essentially MS-DOS, which in turn was derived from Q-DOS, which was originally intended to be a development system while waiting for CP/M-86 to be released. At that time, DOS was clearly a poor imitation of CP/M. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org