If the Russians wanted to copy IBM Corp’s OS/360, why didn’t they do the bloody thing properly, that great man Faqir Kohli, hailing from the Northwest Frontier and head of Tata Computer Services once asked us – and we feel just the same about Microsoft Corp and CP/M – when you do an overwrite or a copy in CP/M, a new file is created, and the command can be interrupted at any point until it is completed, in which case you find the old file still intact and a new *.
$ string which will contain some of the stuff you copied; try it in MS-DOS – even MS-DOS 5, and you find that the first thing the stupid operating system does is delete the old file, so if you change your mind halfway through the copy, you’ve lost everything – and a write won’t accept an interrupt until its finished, which is a fine way to waste your time if you change your mind.
