IBM Corp today plans to launch PC-DOS 6.1, its answer to Microsoft Corp’s most controversial release of the operating system for several years, MS-DOS 6.0. The product is expected to be the last IBM will derive from its cross-licence agreement with Microsoft. The company claimed to Reuter that PC-DOS 6.1 has better reliability than MS-DOS 6.0 and is up to 10% faster. It will be available July 26, priced just under the Microsoft version, which goes for about $50 and has sold some 3.9m copies. It includes memory manager and disk back-up utilities developed by Central Point Software Inc, Beaverton, Oregon, which are said to be superior to those in MS-DOS 6.0m, and also has IBM proprietary virus-detection. It will not however include a software compression system – on grounds that Micosoft’s DoubleSpace is blamed for most of the problems users have reported with MS-DOS 6.0. It will however include a coupon for a free copy of Addstor Inc’s SuperStor/DS compression pro gram, to ship later in the summer.
