SUBJ: megados                    (R2)  FROM: Brenda g4   11/28/92   S#:
523610  
I have been hearing about a product called Mega Dos. It is supposed to
be an IBM minitower with drive slots. The person that posted it on a
local BBS just got his version with a 1581 and 90 meg HD installed.

The company has supposedly re-written the JiffyDOS routines in the CMD
HD to be faster, with 50 fewer bugs. They are supposed to be working on
an enhanced 64 and a RAMDrive. It is said to have a multiplexer. It is
not supposed to be compatible with RAMLink, but it can use IEEE. LTK,
CMD, Megados modes are switchable.

It was mentioned by this person that CMD tried to license this/these
product(s).

Any thoughts?
  
                  -::-

SUBJ: *                          (R)   FROM: CMD         11/28/92   S#:
491016  
I saw the message too, Brenda, and we know about as much as you do about
our 'attempting' to license anything from the makers of this. Though in
my impression of the message it sounded more like they said that they
were going to produce a serial bus multiplexer which we had attempted to
license, and it didn't appear to me that it was stating that we had
attempted to license anything from the person(s) making 'MegaDOS'.

For the record, we were offered the rights to C-SCAN+, which we turned
down as we have our own design which is far superior to C-SCAN+, which
we may produce if we see enough interest. We thought that perhaps this
was the product they meant, however, we got a another call from the
company that held the rights to that product just last week, and they
still own it.

So as far as that part of the message is concerned, it's pure
fabrication.

As for the rest, I can't say. I haven't seen the product, nor have the
person(s) making it bothered identifying themselves directly to us,
though we think we know who it is.

As for the claim of fixing 50+ bugs in the DOS, I'd like to see the
list. I can think of two that exist, and if these folks are who we
think, I sincerely doubt they are capable of fixing one of those. They
may be fixing a number of non-harmful 'bugs' which we put into the DOS
quite on purpose, things which emulate bugs in Commodore's DOS to assure
compatibility with a few off-the-wall programs.

Further, I have stated before that JiffyDOS COULD be faster, but we have
avoided implementing it as such to maintain good hardware and software
compatibility.

Now, we don't care at all if someone offers patches to our existing
HD-DOS, as that is quite legal and we would encourage them to work with
us to insure compatibility with future releases. However, if these folks
are patching our DOS and distributing it that way, then that is quite
another story. 

We've also heard that these folks plan on releasing 'their own' version
of 'JiffyDOS'. Well, I hope for their sakes that it is ALL their own,
and I surely hope that THEY are not the ones saying that this is in any
way connected with or based on JiffyDOS. We have nothing against someone
making an honest living on their own work, but we won't stand to have
someone make a few changes to our work and sell it without paying a
proper royalty. Naturally they'll have to deal with Commodore as well if
they plan on making replacement Kernal and DOS ROMs, but from what I've
heard so far, I don't think these folks plan on doing things the 'legal'
way.