At 02:07 PM 12/7/2004, you wrote:
>David: in case you've forgotten the nightmare that was CP/M ...

Alas, no, I can't seem to purge the last memories of it from my mind!
>a different BIOS for every manufacturer's machine was only the
>start. There was then the problem that every manufacturer picked
>a different floppy disk formatting scheme, the better to
>lock out their competitors.

Yeah, that one had me pretty cheesed...and it wasn't just the CP/M folks, either. All the freakin' other systems all had totally
whacked formats, too. Apple ][ floppies different that C-64 floppies different that Atari 400/800 floppies...but yeah the CP/M universe was that madness writ large.

> Not to mention using different TTY
>control codes.

I blame the terminal manufacturers for starting that fine tradition!
> This wasn't too bad for the software
>developers if they restricted themselves to writing code that
>used the BDOS and no undocumented or proprietary BIOS calls and
>which had some sort of bastard cousin of Termcap to figure out
>how to address the screen, but for high-performance stuff it was
>a nightmare of market fragmentation.

Early MS-DOS wasn't a lot better in this regard, but not QUITE as nightmarish...christ I'm having flashbacks to writing assembler
graphics routines back in the day now.

>It meant the business
>computer market (at least, for S-100 based CP/M boxen) was as
>fragmented as the UNIX market was, a decade later.
>
>The one unequivocally good thing that the IBM PC brought
>was a measure of standards-based sanity, because even crap
>standards are better than deliberate market-sequestrating
>incompatability.

Well I suppose jacking around with batch files and config.sys
endlessly IS at least do-able for mortals, compared to "you need
to fix this BIOS call in assembler" :-)

-David