(aka '''DR''' or '''DRI'''; originally '''Intergalactic Digital Research''') was the company created by Dr.
Gary Kildall to market and develop his
CP/M Operating System and related products. It was the first large software company in the
Microcomputer world. Digital Research should not be confused with
Digital Equipment Corporation ; the two were not affiliated. It was based in
Pacific Grove, California .
The company's operating systems, starting with CP/M for
8080 /
Z80 -based microcomputers, were the
De Facto standard of their era, as
MS-DOS and
MS Windows became later. DR's product suite included the original CP/M and its various offshoots;
DR-DOS which was a
MS-DOS compatible version of CP/M, and
MP/M , the multi-user CP/M. The first 16-bit system was
CP/M-86 , which was to be unsuccessful in competition with
MS-DOS . There followed , a single-user version of the multi-tasking MP/M-86 featuring "virtual consoles" from which applications could be launched to run concurrently. Successive revisions of this system, which gradually supported MS-DOS applications and the FAT filesystem, were labelled '''Concurrent DOS''', '''Concurrent DOS XM''' and
Concurrent DOS 386 .
Soon after the introduction of the
Intel 80286 , DR introduced a radical new real-time system, initially called and subsequently
Flex OS . This exploited the greater memory addressing capability of the new
CPU to provide a more flexible multi-tasking environment. There was a small but powerful set of system
API s, each with a synchronous and an asynchronous variant.
Pipes were supported, and all named resources could be aliased by setting
Environment Variables . This system was to enjoy enduring favour in point-of-sale systems and was adopted by the
IBM 4690 .
Digital Research was purchased by
Novell in
1991 , primarily for Novell to gain access to the OS line.
DR produced a selection of
Programming Language Compiler s and
Interpreter s for their OS-supported platforms, including
C ,
Pascal ,
COBOL ,
Forth ,
PL/I ,
PL/M ,
BASIC , and
Logo . They also produced a microcomputer version of the
GKS graphics standard (related to
NAPLPS ) called , and later used this as the basis of their
GEM GUI . Less known are their application programs, limited largely to the GSX-based DR-DRAW and a small suite of GUI programs for GEM.
When the IBM Personal Computer was being developed, DR was asked to supply a version of CP/M written for the Intel 8086 microprocessor as the standard operating system for the PC, which used the code-compatible Intel 8088 chip. DR, which had the dominant OS system of the day, was uneasy about the agreement with IBM and refused,
Microsoft seized this opportunity to supply the OS in addition to other software (e.g. Basic) for the new IBM PC. When the IBM PC arrived in late
1981 , it came with
PC-DOS , which was developed from
86-DOS , which
Microsoft acquired for this purpose. By mid-1982, it was marketed as
MS-DOS for use in hardware compatible non-IBM computers. This one decision resulted in Microsoft becoming the leading name in computer software. This story is detailed in the PBS series
Triumph of the Nerds .
Digital Research developed
CP/M-86 as an alternative to MS-DOS and it was made available through IBM in early 1982. DR later created an MS-DOS clone with advanced features called
DR-DOS , which pressured Microsoft to further improve its own DOS. The competition between MS-DOS and DR-DOS is one of the more controversial chapters of microcomputer history. Microsoft offered the best licensing terms to computer manufacturers that committed to selling MS-DOS with every processor they shipped, making it uneconomical for them to offer both systems. This practice led to a 1994 government antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft that barred it from per-processor licensing. DRI (and later its successor
Caldera Systems ) accused Microsoft of announcing
Vaporware versions of MS-DOS to suppress sales of DR-DOS. Microsoft refused to support DR-DOS in
Windows ; in one
Beta Release of Windows, Microsoft included code that detected DR-DOS and displayed a warning message. DRI's successor
Caldera Systems raised these disputes in a 1996 lawsuit, but the case was settled without a trial. As a condition of the settlement Microsoft paid Caldera $150 million and Caldera destroyed all documents it had produced in connection with the case.
