What Is Equivalent Of DOS and Apple use?

DOS (for IBM PCs) and Apple DOS are 2 different things.

Microsoft wrote/bought MS-DOS. They didn't buy it from Apple, they bought it from Seattle Computer Products (it was called QDOS at the time). Apple wrote Apple DOS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS

Apple DOS hasn't been used since the Apple ][

Underlying OS X is BSD Unix. You can liken BSD Unix to a tank, and MS-DOS to a pinto.

DOS= disk operating system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS

Apple uses Unix as of OS X.

Prior to OS X, apple used a different, non-dos operating system. Dos I believe is unique to microsoft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix


You access unix via the terminal. There is some sort of DOS shell on windoze. There is a very superficial resemblance, sort of like the resemblance of human English to the gruntings of paleolithic cave-men. Only Noam Chomsky can detect the similarities in linguistic structures.

None that I am aware.

I think microsoft invested in Apple, but I don't know if there was anything more than an agreement to distribute exploder and a test copy of office.

Darwin is the flavor of unix used by OS X, and it most closely resembles FreeBSD. Dos is completely different.

Here's the skinny on Apple & MS:

Back when the Apple II existed (many years ago), Microsoft wrote the Integer BASIC language that preceded Applesoft BASIC. Apple's in those days did use a Disk Operating System, but it was written by Apple. That DOS made it to version 3.3 before Apple replaced it with ProDOS.

Microsoft did write some early Mac software, most notably Microsoft Word (which was originally a Mac program, believe it or not). However, Apple and MS parted ways shortly after that and MS created DOS (or more accurately, bought it) and licensed it to IBM for the IBM PC as PC-DOS. Later on, the "PC" was dropped and it just became MS-DOS when the PC clones came along.

Does that clear it up a bit?

CP/M-80, by Digital Research, was in wide use - long before DOS. Gary Kidall, creator of CP/M, mantained, that DOS was a sense in a pirated version of CP/M. The first 36 system calls in DOS were identical to those in CP/M - by random chance, of course.

Jeff is correct - while MS-DOS was purchased (mostly, I'm sure they did some polish on it) it wasn't bought from Apple. In fact the Apple DOS was not invented until the Disk II drive was released. Prior to the Disk II, Apple II's read programs from (wait for it) a CASSETTE tape drive! Just a plain old cassette drive.

When the Disk II was released Apple realized there was no native support for it, so the Disk Operating System (literally, a system for operating the disk drive) was released along with it.

And yes, CP/M was already in existence (I actually worked for a company that used Apple II's with Z80 processor cards installed so they could run CP/M) and almost all of MS-DOS's commands are, quite literally, the same, including the backward slash in path names.

ProDOS was never used on Macs, the Mac OS (System 1) was created for the Mac. However, ProDOS was the basis for GSOS, the Mac-style OS that the Apple II GS ran.

I was lucky enough to be there when the Apple II, IIGS and Mac were first sold and experienced most of this stuff first hand. 🙂

The reason your computer used to freeze is because you didn't know how to use it.

Edited: and btw, my mac used to freeze sometimes when I did stuff with memory like that, but it rarely froze when doing normal things.

Well, if you're running OS 9 apps in "classic" mode, it's not quite the same as running OS 9. As the "bridge" OS between the old Mac OS and OS X, OS 9 had a few problems. Most notably, it had the ability to support multiple users, but some programs still assumed you were the lone user of the machine.

No, it doesn't bother me that you prefer OS X! I'd think you were nuts if you didn't! Most of what wound up as OS X was the NeXT OS. I'm really glad we're on a unix-based OS now, it makes life so much easier.

But I can't help but be nostalgic about the "good ol' days" and my early Apple computers. At the time, they were the bomb!

Here's a laugh for you - my first modem as a 300 baud (compare that to 56k baud). You could literally read the text coming across the screen as it came in from the modem!

The reason that OS9 can freeze is that programs can overwrite memory that is not "theirs", it runs in a non-protected memory management mode.

Apple had a project, Copeland, I believe, (or was it BH Astronomer 8^)?) that tried to kludge memory management onto MacOS [7, IIRC]. It never saw the light of day. Steve Jobs came back to Apple and made the tough, but correct IMHO, decision to scrap MacOS and port NextOS into darwin and OSX.

A pertinent fact not mentioned in the discussion is that IBM wrote what they also called "DOS" prior to any of the versions mentioned. It was created to run on their smaller Model 360 computers, prevalent in the 1970s. My first professional job in 1975 was on such a machine.

Thanks, Ken, I didn't know that. Although, I too worked on larger computers and I know that they had both floppy and hard disk drives long before personal computers existed.

I worked with a Sperry/Univac that had an 8" floppy drive! It was mounted vertically in the console (like a toaster). The whole machine (console, disk packs, and tape drive) was about 15 feet long and had 4 mb of memory. This was circa 1986, and the machine wasn't new then.