RE: Network Solutions Dropped as Registrar Of Internet Domains

Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Fri, 25 Apr 1997 06:47:10 -0400 (EDT)


Joe Barrera writes:
> But that metaphor works against them. Believe it or not, Microsoft does
> NOT have a monopoly on DOS. There are lots of DOS clones out there -
> there was one that Rob Malan wrote for Mach, and of course there is
> Digital Research's DR-DOS, since owned by Novell and now Caldera, and a
> "Free-DOS" project (http://luna.bearnet.com/freedos/info.html) more
> along Linux lines... (I'm not even counting IBM's PC-DOS)

But that's less relevant nowadays, since Windows 95 "no longer
requires DOS".

Of course, lots of people discovered very quickly that there is
something in there calling itself DOS 7.0 which starts a gui called
win-something-or-other out of its autoexec.bat file on startup, and
gives you pretty much a traditional DOS prompt with the traditional
commands when the relevant line is removed from autoexec.bat.

However, since Microsoft "eliminated DOS" (if only from their
marketing materials), it becomes a lot harder to accuse them of
anticompetitive practices for producing a GUI layer that runs only on
their *own* DOS, and not on the others Joe named above...

rst