can anyone remember...?

[miriam_e]

Years back Microsoft destroyed a company that produced a much improved command line for MSWindows. It was a drop-in replacement for DOS, and gave users much greater functionality. Microsoft saw it as a competitor and deliberately destroyed it by adding fake error messages into Windows. Running processes were checked to see if they used the "competitor" DOS, in which case Windows would put up a fake error message. Some years ago a computer magazine actually published the code in MSWindows which did this bit of nastiness. (I still have it somewhere.)

Can anybody remember what the name of that DOS was?

---

Found it: DR-DOS, by Digital Research.

Read this:
http://www.kickassgear.com/Articles/Microsoft.htm
to get an idea of the depths of deception they indulged in. It features internal emails from Microsoft on how they lied to their customers and set about destroying the superior DR-DOS.

This one shows how Microsoft views their customers with disgust, considering crashing people's computers if they tried to install DR-DOS and to confuse people with legalistic FUD.
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9808&L=list310&P=2052

Comments

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

We ran DR-DOS at my secondary school (along with a somewhat fragile Novell network 91/92). It was a superior OS but there was an option of starting Windows.

I was a regular reader of APC (Australian PC magazine) back then and recall some of the stuff Miscorosft got up to. eg: Digital Research commented that they'd had people at conventions get their hotel-rooms broken-into, ransacked, and laptops accessed. The laptops never went missing, but there was evidence they'd been used and tampered with (trying to dig-up sourcecode or dirt). Their suspicion that Microsoft was behind the criminal activity was confirmed by a combination of means (onsite security, steganography, etc.) but they never had quite enough evidence to press charges on those grounds (note that they went public with their claims and weren't sued for libel/slander)...besides, they were already tied-up with much larger legal problems.

You may also be interested in the history of GeoWorks Ensemble. IIRC, it was a drop-in replacement for Win3.0. It had a good emulation engine (sat on top of DOS, like Windows did) and ran a lot faster than Windows...so Microsoft sued them out of existence. Pity, cos it had real multi-tasking and a bunch of other nice features. The GUI was very slick and looked closer to Amiga's workbench than the klunkiness of Windows. Geoworks had been careful to keep things above-board and looked like they were taking-off, but they were eventually crippled by the weight of constantly defending themselves in court.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've heard some very nice things about GeoWorks, but never saw it.

[gothxxangel.livejournal.com]

Oh sheesh--Microsoft. Why does this not surprise me?

In a strange way it kind of reminds me of the Wright brothers' taking out a patent on any kind of flying machine after they invented theirs and thus delayed the advancement of flight technology.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Weird thing is there were a lot of people around the world building flying machines at the time the Wright brothers did their stuff. A number of times the brothers were stumped and were helped by other people who had solved a number of the problems earlier. The first guy to successfully build a flying machine was a New Zealander (can't remember his name off-hand). There was another guy, an Australian, who built his own machine and flew it, who shared info with the Wright brothers. Yet history remembers the ones who stomped on the competition instead of the fact that it was a worldwide collective effort.

I like to think that is changing.