Origins
86-DOS was created because sales of the Seattle Computer Products 8086 computer kit, demonstrated in June 1979 and shipped in November, were languishing due to the absence of an operating system. The only software which SCP could sell with the board was the stand-alone Microsoft BASIC-86, which Microsoft had developed on a prototype of SCP's hardware. SCP wanted to offer the 8086 version of CP/M that Digital Research had announced, but its release date was uncertain. This was not the first time Digital Research had lagged behind hardware developments; two years earlier it had been slow to adapt CP/M for new floppy disk formats and hard disks. In April 1980 SCP assigned 24-year-old Tim Paterson to develop a substitute for CP/M-86.
Paterson designed 86-DOS with an API that was compatible with legacy CP/M programs. At the same time he made a number of changes and enhancements to address what he saw as CP/M's shortcomings. CP/M cached file system information in memory for speed, but this required a user to force an update to a disk before removing it; if the user forgot, the disk would be corrupt. Paterson took the safer but slower approach of updating the disk with each operation. CP/M's PIP command, which copied files, supported several special file names that referred to hardware devices such as printers and communication ports. Paterson built these names into the operating system as device files so that any program could use them. He gave his copying program the more intuitive name COPY. Rather than implementing CP/M's file system, he used BASIC-86's FAT filesystem to maintain compatibility with systems that SCP had already shipped.
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