Re: Inevitable? No.
> The very issue of Byte that reviewed the IBM PC had a Digital Research CP/M-86 ad with a guy in a bad leisure suit pointing to a chart showing the millions of units they'd ship over the next several years. Well, those millions of sales never happened, since IBM went with IBM PC-DOS/MS-DOS.
Actually, around that time DRI was demonstrating Concurrent-CP/M-86 which was pre-emptive multi-tasking with virtual screens. It was based on MP/M-86 (multi-user) which was the 8086 version of MP/M from 1978 and MP/M II of 1980. DRI also had DR-NET networking for those machines.
So while the IBM-PC ran PC-DOS 1 which couldn't even support hard disks (though it did have a cassette tape port - I have one here), DRI was in the multi-user, networking and multi-tasking business. DRI did ship millions of sales - just not in the same market.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
