Sometimes small and simple is good.
The lesson seems to be: it's a race to the bottom on price. The lesson seems to be: get lucky and have your competitor just happen to be on a trip the day IBM knocks at their door. The lesson seems to be: have a parent who sells your stuff direct the board. The lesson seems to be: take advantage of decades of now-non-existant anti-trust atmosphere to make the world's biggest computer company seek outside OS. DOS itself? I struggle to think of anything remarkable at all. Maybe the availability of very cheap BASIC on-ramps for enthusiasts.
The business computing world still, to this day, largely runs on Windows, and Windows NT was built on the foundations of DOS: it bootstraps from a DOS filesystem, as UEFI still does in 2024, and it could be installed from DOS. It implements an API designed on DOS for a DOS GUI and to this day supports DOS-compatible filenames.
All the core system folders in Windows 11 still have DOS-compatible names, from `SYSTEM32` to `SYSWOW64`.
DOS itself was emulated by DR-DOS, FreeDOS, PTS-DOS, and other OSes.
> it's a race to the bottom on price.
Always was, still is. Why do you think Linux does so well? It's not technical merit!
> have your competitor just happen to be on a trip the day IBM knocks at their door.
Absolutely cast-iron lie, and you should be ashamed of yourself for repeating it.
AFAIK Windows NT was mainly influenced by VMS (which Dave Cutler worked on before NT). The DOS-isms were mainly coming in via the Win95 side and for backward compatibility reasons, but I bet everybody on the NT team hated those requirements ;)
> Absolutely cast-iron lie, and you should be ashamed of yourself for repeating it.
Not the parent, but it's at best a good urban legend and not much different from "Gary Kildall was not interested". Do you have any first-person accounts that paint a different picture?
