Although quite well known in Europe, CP/M originator Digital Research Inc, Monterey, California is almost forgotten back home, despite the fact that the company claims to have licensed more than 3m copies of its MS-DOS-compatible DR DOS in the past couple of years, mainly for embedded applications that require the operating system in ROM. Almost half its business is now in Europe, but the company now hopes to win itself new fame and fortune back home by developing end-user applications for Microsoft Windows, the Apple Macintosh, OS/2 and Unix. First new offerings are the 2.0 releases of the Presentation Team business presentation graphics package, which adds customisable charting templates, at $500, and of the Artline graphics design program, which adds an auto-tracing feature and costs $600. Microbytes Daily reports that the company has also teamed up with Award Software Inc, Los Gatos, California to offer a plug-in board for MS-DOS machines that enables users to boot up DR DOS without a disk. Until now, Award has offered DR DOS in silicon or as software modules of object code. DR DOS is in fact an enhanced MS-DOS, and the board makes available the additional features as well as eliminating the need to boot the machine from a hard or floppy disk. It saves 41Kb of main memory space and provides some protection from viruses that latch onto the operating system. Aimed primarily at diskless workstations, where it eliminates the need to boot from a remote server, it also includes some spare memory space, so that resellers can package an application or two with the oprerating system. The board sells for $200.
