about NewDos

NewDos/80 is a third-party operating system that was made available for the Radio Shack TRS-80 line of microcomputers beginning in 1980. NewDos/80 was developed by Apparat, Inc.

of Denver, Colorado.

The operating system had additional commands and features that were not available in TRS-DOS, the native operating system for TRS-80 computers. NewDos/80 allowed TRS-80 computers to take advantage of advances in floppy disk storage that went beyond the initial 87.5KB 35-track, single-density, single-sided format. The system also corrected issues that early versions of TRS-DOS had with arbitrarily losing data due to errors in how it communicated with the contemporary TRS-80 disk drives' 1771 disk controller.

NewDos/80 had many options for specifying specific low-level disk configurations. Settings such as diskette formats, disk drive types, track geometry and controllers could be configured using the PDRIVE command. In version 2.1, Apparat added support for hard disk drives via an external bus adapter.

NewDos/80 was written by Cliff Ive and Jason Matthews. Cliff was the primary author and Jason wrote "patches" for various applications such as Scripsit and VisiCalc. Cliff later retired and Jason went on to other projects in the software business. Cliff was the primary author and visionary of NewDos in all of its incarnations.

Commands

Some typical NewDos/80 commands:

NewDos/80 commands and counterparts in other operating systems

Command	MS-DOS, OS/2, Windows	UNIX, Unix-like
APPEND	type file1 >> file2	cat file >> file2
ATTRIB	attrib	chmod
AUTO	AUTOEXEC.BAT	~/.profile or ~/.login or /etc/rc*
CLOCK	prompt $t *	in some shells: PS1="...\t..." *
COPY	copy	cp
DIR	dir	ls
FORMAT	format	mkfs
FREE	chkdsk	df
KILL	del	rm
LIST	type	cat
LOAD program	program	program
PRINT	type file > prn	lpr
PROT	attrib	chmod
RENAME	ren or rename	mv

Reception

While criticizing NEWDOS's "nearly incomprehensible documentation", Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1980 that it was "a much better operating system" than the "needlessly complex" TRSDOS and stated that "Tandy ought to be marketing NEWDOS+ themselves".