Talk:MIDAS (operating system)

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Hmmm. This is so different than the history of MS-DOS given elsewhere, to the extent that I really wonder if it's not a hoax. Are there any references (other than the three books cited, which I cannot find other references to online?) htom (talk) 04:30, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * The reason that the history is different is that it is a different history - of a different product.  Look carefully - this was a CP/M 80 equivalent for the 8080 processor, not an operating system for the 8086 family. --Wtshymanski (talk) 12:55, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

I doubt this is real...
I would like to make the suggestion that this page gets deleted. I am a computer science student, and I simply love old technology. When I came across M-Dos, I became excited - a new (at least to me) operating system that I never heard of before!

Being the curious person I am, I tried googling an image of the Operating System or a more in depth reference manual - no luck. Then I got curious - could this operating system be under a different name? So I decided to hit the library, and look at old back issues of Byte. Micro-soft would either be advertising this OS, or there would be some type of article, a press release, a joke ("ha ha - Micro-soft's going to take on CP/M. Good luck!!"), something, anything about it. I looked through all the back issues from 1978 - 1982. There was NOTHING about M-Dos that I could find.

Now, maybe Byte didn't mentioned it (doubtful) or maybe I skipped it (again, doubtful). So the only conclusion that I can come up with is that this page is a joke. So please either prove me wrong (PLEASE!) or delete this page.

Thank you

71.137.192.145 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 05:46, 13 August 2010 (UTC).


 * I just found a reference to MIDAS in, “A history of the Personal Computer: The people and the technology” by Roy Allan. Seems like it existed at least as a project. Maybe it isn’t mentioned in BYTE because it was never made a commercial OS. No information in the linked book, either, other than the name.
 * But at least it’s probably no fake article. 92.229.37.146 (talk) 23:38, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

It's quite real
It's quite real, I wrote it. I was surprised it was on Wikipedia though. The product ran on an experimental Panasonic 8080 with bubble memory cartridges (a big 256k). It had 8, 12, and 16 bit FAT structure. It was never released. I still have the manual and some listings. MarcMcd (talk) 23:09, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Thus notable and should be KEPT. Electron9 (talk) 17:40, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
 * How is it notable? It was experimental and never got released?  Surely Microsoft had dozens of projects that never made it out the door, even in 1979. Why is this one important? --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:59, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Notability?
Stepping stone to what, exactly? FAT came out of the freestanding disk BASICs. Did this become a commercial product, did it sell any sofware? Why are we having so much trouble finding citations for it? The above says it was never released. Existence is not notability. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:09, 27 July 2012 (UTC)