[TUHS] Interesting post about Microsoft and UNIX

[Henry Bent]

On Sat, 7 Dec 2024 at 08:09, Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo at alchemistowl.org> wrote:

>
> > On 7 Dec 2024, at 13:34, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Also interesting; I wonder if the "capability to run multiple MS-DOS
> applications under Unix" was shipped in a functional form, and what
> relation it might or might not have had to what was running on the AT&T
> hardware.
>
> I used to run an 80286 “Taiwan clone” (as we called them in Italy) with
> Xenix 286 and, later, its 386 version which was SCO by then (memory a bit
> fuzzy on when Xenix became SCO Xenix and the Unix) and I definitely could
> run MS-DOS programs on the 386 - you would use the dos command which mapped
> drives either to physical drives (i.e. A: was the floppy) or directories
> within the filesystem.
>
> It was often used for businesses which had their inventory on MS-DOS
> bespoke software but wanted to “multitask” so we had some very dirty code
> which would run the DOS program on the serial terminals writing to a
> “network” drive which was actually a directory in the Unix filesystem.
>

Interesting, thank you for the explanation.  How was file locking handled
for DOS programs?  Did it have some sort of internal call to "share" or was
there a more elegant method?

-Henry
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