How to be successful? Of course, all you need to do is get up earlier, purr more often and carry more weight. However, there are people who decide to take a different path - that of fraud. Today I will tell a short story about how Microsoft finished off its competitor, Digital Research.

CP / M

I think that each of you has heard about MS-DOS, which is commonly called DOS. However, as much as this system was popular in Poland, it was not the only system from this family. We also had PC-DOS (which was actually MS-DOS, but developed by IBM) or the above-mentioned DR-DOS (FreeDOS appeared later, but it's also in this family of systems).

DR-DOS is an operating system created by Digital Research. It was created as a successor to another system - CP / M. IBM could not get along with DR, so they signed a contract to supply software from Microsoft. Microsoft decided to buy another operating system - 86-DOS and develop it for IBM's hardware. The similarities of MS and IBM's system to CP/M were so huge that DR wanted to sue these companies for copying their product. As compensation, IBM allowed Digital Research to sell the system alongside PC-DOS (IBM had the right not to use the MS-DOS name). However, IBM's and Microsoft's operating system was much cheaper than its counterpart which meant that CP/M began to be squeezed out of the market.

Digital Research's product was not fully compatible with IBM's, an initial plus began to turn into a minus as PC-DOS began to rule the personal computer market. Even later attempts to improve CP/M could not tip the balance. Simply put, DR systems were too expensive and IBM and Microsoft began to set the trends.

DR-DOS

However, DR rolled up their sleeves and went into battle. The first thing they did, besides achieving compatibility with Microsoft's product, was to significantly lower the price and start introducing newer and newer features to the system - such as HMA support, allowing the system to handle more RAM than 640KB, and file compression. From now on, it was up to Microsoft to make newer and newer changes to keep up with DR-DOS, and they had to cut prices. Customers (and especially computer makers) were so interested in DR's product that they started offering DR's products widely.

If you're going to kill someone there isn't much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.

When a user ran Windows 3.1 Beta on his computer using DR-DOS he was horrified when the system informed him of a "non-fatal error". Every run of Windows or certain programs reported the problem.

This is a feature added at the request of Bill Gates. The message you see here is not a "real" error. Code was added in various parts of the operating system that detected what system it was running on and displayed the message. Of course, DR-DOS handled these programs without a problem and everything worked perfectly despite the error message. However, users of the system seeing such messages, according to the vice president of Microsoft - "(...) to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS".

In the final version of Windows 3.1, the code was disabled, but you could easily enable it by changing 1 byte, and rumours of DR-DOS malfunctioning spread around the world. Not even a patch to pass the "sieve" of AARD

Caldera

DR-DOS was sold to Novell and eventually went to Calder. The first thing the company did when it bought DR-DOS (later Novell DOS) was to file a monopoly case against Microsoft for, among other things, AARD code and "bundling" Windows 95 with MS-DOS (Win95 was a DOS overlay, but installed Microsoft DOS by default, even though DR-DOS could very well have acted as a "shim"). We know from leaks in 2009 that Microsoft paid Caldera $280 million for his practices.

Sources:
- CP/M image Wikipedia, from Digital Research website under PD license.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M#/media/File:CPM-86.png

- Photo Novell DOS, Wikipedia, Ghettoblaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DeviceLogics_DR-DOS_8.0_720x400.png

- Photo of AARD from Wikipedia, from Betawiki under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windows_3.10.068_setup_AARD_code.png

- History of MS-DOS (Coleslav) [PL]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq5qKRAMpLw

- Windows' Hidden Self Destruct Code (Nostalgia Nerd)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIfNIWn2Ad4

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w6zGkTOq6qs" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w6zGkTOq6qs" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Do you know what censorship is?

In Poland, on 31 Jan during the weather forecast, a weather presenter on public television put a sticker promoting a charity which buys equipment for children's treatment.

Unfortunately, this charity is not supported by the government (Because the creator supported women's protest, supporting the abortion of seriously ill babies).

The presenter was fired and the material was removed from the website.

Link to verify:

poznan.tvp.pl/1780092/pogoda

In general, I have been working on Bitblog for some time now, which is a kind of competition for Zapread (but also not entirely, so I am counting on cooperation between projects). For now it is still a very early phase.

Such a description of various curiosities.

1) Iframe + logout ...

According to the conversations with @fwtf I had to set X Frame-Options to Deny. And if it makes it impossible to display the page in Iframe, it's done. Very strange, because I would expect full blocking ... On the other hand, can a browser know how a given page is configured without entering it?

2) Markdown proposal

Markdown has cool features that ordinary HTML code does not have. It is usually a safer form, but it also takes less disk space (and in decentralised systems this is important information). I don't know if Markdown will be available, but tests are ongoing and there is an editor (add_articles2.php). Unfortunately I'm not good at Javascript and configuration of this editor ... but it works quite well for now (but it would be useful to throw away HTML completely).

Eh, and Fervi is spoiling again ;) Well, it seems to me that we need to approach the issue of social networks on Bitcoin differently. There are different social networks and none of them are excluded (Twitter is not a competition for Facebook or Instagram) and so BitBlog will not be a competition for Zapread, but a complement.

People want to join groups, so we use Discords or Zapread (although I'm not very active doesn't mean I'm not there :D). We want to be part of something!

My plan is this. Creating a simple system to create posts (like a blog). Thanks to its openness the system can even be decentralized, where content can be sent to other Nodes. After all, it is the site administrator who can decide what can and cannot be found on his site. Of course, nodes themselves can be independent and connect to their favorite nodes with similar interests.

Of course, what I want is for my instance to automatically upload user entries to Zapread if it is created. Thanks to proper "architecture" construction (e.g. it will be possible to have one tag, compatibility with Zapread restrictions) it should be possible. Of course, the user will be able to disable the upload of his Zapread entries (e.g. when he wants to do it from his account).

I think that cooperation can help us and I would like to strive for it. Maybe we can help Yalls somehow, but I don't know how yet ;)

Some remember my old DGameMarket project based on STEEM shitcoin. Although the concept of "DGame" brand was cool for me (there were supposed to be some interesting brands related), unfortunately, because of shitcoin reasons the project fell down (Shitcoin died).

So I had to manage the projects differently. Of course, as Bitcoin has always ruled the world of cryptovalut - the choice had to fall on him (no competition).

DGameMarket is the second iteration of the project ... DGameMarket. Based on experience I decided to make a product that will be better than the original version:
- Automated .
- Trust minimized
- Safe
- Open Source

If there are people willing to test - please write to me on Zapread or Discord. The more errors and problems we solve, the better.

I want to thank @fwtf for reporting security related bugs.