History
SpartaDOS X is named after its predecessors, SpartaDOS 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 (also ICD products), and enjoys good level of backward compatibility with the older SpartaDOS software. But it is not, contrary to what can be thought considering the name and the version number, a newer version of SpartaDOS 3.0. It was a completely new system, written from scratch.
SpartaDOS X 4.0 was originally developed by Michael Gustafson in 1987-89, and shipped on 64k ROM cartridges by ICD, Inc. up to version 4.21. The cartridge contained an additional cartridge slot on itself, so that it was possible to plug-in another cartridge, such as ICD's R-Time 8 battery-backed clock, a language cartridge (Action!, MAC/65 etc.) or a game cartridge, and use it in conjunction with the DOS.
In 1992 Atari Corp. dropped all the official support for their 8-bit computers, and so did ICD shortly after that. The rights for the 8-bit ICD inventory were purchased in November 1993 by some Michael Hohman, officially as Fine Tooned Engineering (FTe). FTe released a (barely) updated version 4.22 on 5 November 1995, and, after two or three years, having financial problems, disappeared together with all the items and rights it owned.
Ten years later development of SpartaDOS X, then considered abandonware, was picked up by its enthusiasts, as SpartaDOS X Upgrade Project. It resulted in several unofficial revisions of the software, incorporating many of the utilities written since 1992, cleaning many identified problems and including numerous improvements. As of 2011 the published versions are: 4.31 (2005), 4.39RC (2006), 4.40 (a leaked-out beta, 2006), 4.41 (Feb. 2008), 4.42 (Dec. 2008), 4.43 (Apr. 2011), 4.44 (Jun. 2011), 4.45 (Nov. 2011) and 4.46 (Jan. 2013).
Read more about this topic: Sparta DOS X
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)