umcarls9@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Charles Carlson) (02/15/90)
I have heard rumour several times, which people claim to be fact, that a while ago, Microsoft released a multitasking version of MS-DOS to the European market, in reponse to market competition there. Does anyone know anything about this? If it does exist, why hasn't it ever made it to the west atleast in one form or the other??? Surely a distributer would have picked it up and started selling it here? Assuming it does exist, could someone that has had experience with it post what they know about it? Ie, how well does it really work? Whats the highest DOS version its compatable with? What is its price compared to regular DOS? Thanks, Charles umcarls9@ccu.umanitoba.ca
ttak@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Timothy Takahashi) (02/15/90)
In article <1990Feb14.225742.20401@ccu.umanitoba.ca> umcarls9@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Charles Carlson) writes: > >I have heard rumour several times, which people claim to be fact, >that a while ago, Microsoft released a multitasking version of MS-DOS >to the European market, in reponse to market competition there. I seem to remember that one of the later versions of Concurrent CPM/86 was repudedly MS-DOS compatible. Somehow, I doubt that MS-DOS compatible ment IBM compatible. Why not use DesqView or Windows? for a single user or PC-MOS for multiple users. tim
Ralf.Brown@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (02/15/90)
In article <1990Feb14.225742.20401@ccu.umanitoba.ca>, umcarls9@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Charles Carlson) wrote: }I have heard rumour several times, which people claim to be fact, }that a while ago, Microsoft released a multitasking version of MS-DOS }to the European market, in reponse to market competition there. }Does anyone know anything about this? If it does exist, why hasn't it }ever made it to the west atleast in one form or the other??? Surely }a distributer would have picked it up and started selling it here? It was an OEM-only version numbered 4.0 (so much for keeping version numbers unique...) which had limited multitasking ability in that a specially-written program could continue running in the background while some other program was being used in the foreground. -- UUCP: {ucbvax,harvard}!cs.cmu.edu!ralf -=- 412-268-3053 (school) -=- FAX: ask ARPA: ralf@cs.cmu.edu BIT: ralf%cs.cmu.edu@CMUCCVMA FIDO: Ralf Brown 1:129/46 "How to Prove It" by Dana Angluin Disclaimer? I claimed something? 14. proof by importance: A large body of useful consequences all follow from the proposition in question.
springal@hsi.UUCP (Rob Springall) (02/16/90)
In article <5261@ur-cc.UUCP> ttak@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Timothy Takahashi) writes: >In article <1990Feb14.225742.20401@ccu.umanitoba.ca> umcarls9@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Charles Carlson) writes: >>I have heard rumour several times, which people claim to be fact, >>that a while ago, Microsoft released a multitasking version of MS-DOS >>to the European market, in reponse to market competition there. > >I seem to remember that one of the later versions of Concurrent CPM/86 >was repudedly MS-DOS compatible. Somehow, I doubt that MS-DOS compatible >ment IBM compatible. A few years ago (when 286s were all the rage) Digital Research came out with a Concurrent MS-DOS (or something like that). As I remember, it let you have four tasks loaded at one time and it time sliced in between them. The program was an absolute dog (VERY slow) and a kludge. It was actually Concurrent CP/M-86 that was made to look like DOS. All of the DOS commands that were internal became external, all the error messages were CP/M... Piece of garbage but my boss at the time was very high on CP/M and DR. -- Rob Springall springal@hsi.com Health Systems International ...!{uunet, yale}!hsi!springal New Haven, CT
bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright) (02/18/90)
In article <1130@hsi86.hsi.UUCP>, springal@hsi.UUCP (Rob Springall) writes: > In article <5261@ur-cc.UUCP> ttak@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Timothy Takahashi) writes: > >I seem to remember that one of the later versions of Concurrent CPM/86 > >was repudedly MS-DOS compatible. Somehow, I doubt that MS-DOS compatible > >ment IBM compatible. > > A few years ago (when 286s were all the rage) Digital Research came out with > a Concurrent MS-DOS (or something like that). As I remember, it let you have > four tasks loaded at one time and it time sliced in between them. > > The program was an absolute dog (VERY slow) and a kludge. It was actually > Concurrent CP/M-86 that was made to look like DOS. All of the DOS commands > that were internal became external, all the error messages were CP/M... > Piece of garbage but my boss at the time was very high on CP/M and DR. This sounds somewhat confused. Concurrent PC-DOS could certainly handle more than 4 tasks. However, it included a rather crude windowing system which ran in text mode (character based windows rather than graphics based windows) and it allowed up to 4 windows on the main console (you could also have a session on each serial port). Each window was equivalent to one MS-DOS session (not a separate application as on Microsoft Windows). You are probably thinking of the number of windows rather than tasks. A task however could be run without a window if it was a background task (admittedly not something that a lot of PC users do, but _very_ useful for some OEM applications). This would allow many more than the 6 tasks you get by adding up the MS-DOS sessions (4 console + 2 serial port) in a simplistic way, though you do run out of memory on a 640K machine fairly quickly. I disagree that it was all that slow. Certainly some applications (notably those hostile applications that would poll the keyboard with a busy wait, or do CPU-bound timing delay loops) could do bad things to the system, but that's really a problem with the application program and all multi-tasking systems can have problems with this kind of hostile program (though there are differences in how intelligently the system can reduce the offending application's priority to the ugly stepchild priority). It did take up a fair amount of memory (about 256K for the OS alone), but it allowed some programs to be run out of expanded memory. In its day it wasn't a bad idea. On the other hand, there were some serious problems with the system that this article doesn't even mention. For one thing, early versions did not support either the MS-DOS batch language or ANSI.SYS. DRI had it emulate another terminal (which may be fine in the abstract but it doesn't help the MS-DOS compatibility very much). Not emulating the batch language was even worse. Early versions also had some horrible bugs (notably with such things as hard drives > 20MB). They also omitted such useful things as the MS-DOS environment space (!) in early versions. And numerous MS-DOS system calls just didn't work properly (it took several releases to fix all the system call problems). Later versions have fixed most or all of these early problems, but at the cost of making the system MUCH pickier about what hardware it runs on. If you aren't running an IBM-PC or a Compaq with all the cards from the same vendor, there is a _high_ probability that it won't work. It is, from everything I've seen, even more hardware-picky than OS/2. You will still have problems running huge applications on it unless you have a 386 (then the memory management becomes much easier). This is pretty much a hardware limitation - a multitasking system just takes more memory than a single tasking system, and you probably don't want a single task taking up the whole machine; and a 286 just can't run each application in a virtual 8086 environment. I wouldn't call it a piece of garbage but there are now better alternatives available. Bruce C. Wright
ash@mlacus.oz (Ash Nallawalla) (02/28/90)
In article <1990Feb14.225742.20401@ccu.umanitoba.ca>, umcarls9@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Charles Carlson) writes: > > I have heard rumour several times, which people claim to be fact, > that a while ago, Microsoft released a multitasking version of MS-DOS > to the European market, in reponse to market competition there. I recall seeing something in Australia under the name MS-DOS 4.0 (when 3.3 was the released version). It was a beta release only. I don't think it was anything like the present 4.0. Hopefully others in oz may know more. -- ============================================================================= Ash Nallawalla Tel: +61 3 823-1959 Fax: +61 3 820-1434 ZL4LM/VK3CIT Postal: P.O. Box 539, Werribee VIC 3030, Australia.