Top all-time · #4936
Tim Paterson
Personal blog · dosmandrivel.blogspot.comsystemshistory
Tim Paterson writes DosMan Drivel, a personal blog at dosmandrivel.blogspot.com about systems and history. Since 2011, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “The First DOS Machine (2007)”. The last post was in 2011, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Tim Paterson's blog is cited as a first-hand account of how he designed DOS, including its CP/M compatibility and the 8086 origins of the OS. Commenters use it as a source on the history.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
From the original author of DOS
Most-linked posts?
- The First DOS Machine (2007)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-11-15
- /2007/08/is-dos-rip-off-of-cpm.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-08-11
- The author of DOS: All Those Floppy Disk Formats…2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-07-26
- Design of DOS (2007)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-07-16
What Hacker News says?
I thought this was interesting: "Intel documented how the original software developer could mechanically translate an 8-bit program into a 16-bit program. Only the developer of the program with possession of the source code could make this translation. I designed DOS so the translated program would work the same as it had with CP/M – translation compatibility. The key to making this work was implementing the CP/M AP…
Comment linking /2007/08/is-dos-rip-off-of-cpm.html
on “A look back at memory models in 16-bit MS-DOS”Submitted The blog of the original author of DOS: Tim Paterson as a story · 90 points
HN discussionI just found Tim Paterson's article at http://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/2007/09/design-of-dos.html?... which says my comment above got an important thing wrong: the sector size on 8" disks was typically 128 bytes, so CP/M was reading per sector. He mentions that North Star DOS used 256-byte sectors. I'm pretty sure the logical HDOS sectors on my H-89 5¼" single-density floppies were 512 bytes, but I've never interac…
Comment linking /2007/09/design-of-dos.html?m=1
on “The UCSD p-System, Apple Pascal, and a dream of cross-platform compatibility”Submitted The IBM PC ran at 4.77MHz due to a decision made in 1953 as a story · 47 points
HN discussionPaterson claims CP/M-86 wasn't released yet in http://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/2007/09/design-of-dos.html?... : > We knew Digital Research was working on a 16-bit OS, CP/M-86. At one point we were expecting it to be available at the end of 1979. Had it made its debut at any time before DOS was working, the DOS project would have been dropped. SCP wanted to be a hardware company, not a software company.
Comment linking /2007/09/design-of-dos.html?m=1
on “The UCSD p-System, Apple Pascal, and a dream of cross-platform compatibility”Submitted The First DOS Machine (2007) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionGiven the context and your reference to Quake, I assume by "the older days" you mean the 90s, PCs and early Windows? If you weren't previously aware of "The Old New Thing" blog, Raymond Chen has been sharing stories about Windows 95 development for decades at this point. So many in fact, he published a book under the same name (the book is essentially a best-of collection from the blog in paper form). The os2museum[…
Comment linking /
on “Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?”Submitted The First DOS Machine (2007) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis has never been a serious question. People have looked at DOS for years and never found any stolen CP/M code. Tim Paterson has written about how DOS was designed here: https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/2007/09/design-of-dos.html https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-dos-rip-off-of-... . His employer was selling an 8086 computer but had no operating system for it, so he proposed making QDOS, a placeholder…
Comment linking /2007/08/is-dos-rip-off-of-cpm.html
on “GitHub – DOS 1.0: Transcription of Tim Paterson's DOS Printouts”Submitted The first machine that ran DOS (and without the 640kB barrier) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The First DOS Machine (2007) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The First DOS Machine (2007) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The First DOS Machine (Tim Paterson) (2007) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The author of DOS: All Those Floppy Disk Formats… as a story · 2 points
HN discussion- xd · 2011-10-09
Submitted Paul Allen and I as a story · 2 points
HN discussion Submitted Design of DOS (2007) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted All Those Floppy Disk Formats… as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Design of the DOS filesystem as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
