My company "Lindley Systems" did all this from 1980 (when I was 14) until the mid 90s, in the Heathkit (later Heath/Zenith) arena. I still have master diskettes and original manuals ready for taking to the Xerox shop, and only a few years ago tossed boxes full of registration cards (with 13 cent stamps on them).
We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M and MS-DOS but never shipped a product for MS Windows. We almost had a product ready in 1996 but then MS "upgraded" VB 3 to VB 4 and we started a rewrite, almost completed just in time for the "upgrade" to VB 5 - by which time our market had moved on.
It was a fun time to build custom and specialized hardware and software.
TMWNN · 29m ago
> We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M
A very unusual case of a company explicitly deprecating its own proprietary OS, and shifting to an external standard, on the same hardware. Tandy giving existing Model 16 customers Xenix and shipping it with new units is the only other case I can think of offhand.
> We couldn’t reach potential customers directly (there was no web), so we had to groom editors of computer magazines and feed information to them, hoping they would print it in their magazines.
Editors of computer magazines were the "influencers" in the '80s.
jcmontx · 1h ago
What a great read. I've lived all of my professional life (2014-) shipping productive code by just pushing to repos or specific branches. I avoid getting into mobile app development due to what a pain it is to get to the stores and stay compliant with ever-changing policies. I can't even imagine what was like delivering software in a cartridge or CD without a chance to update afterwards. It feels like such a titanic endeavor
We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M and MS-DOS but never shipped a product for MS Windows. We almost had a product ready in 1996 but then MS "upgraded" VB 3 to VB 4 and we started a rewrite, almost completed just in time for the "upgrade" to VB 5 - by which time our market had moved on.
It was a fun time to build custom and specialized hardware and software.
A very unusual case of a company explicitly deprecating its own proprietary OS, and shifting to an external standard, on the same hardware. Tandy giving existing Model 16 customers Xenix and shipping it with new units is the only other case I can think of offhand.
What do you think of this 1983 ACM paper comparing HDOS and CP/M? <http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/358070/p188-pechura.p...>
Editors of computer magazines were the "influencers" in the '80s.