MRI (Marginal Research Inc) of San Obscuro California, unveiled MR-DOS, a single-user nontasking operating system package for personal computers. Tyler Sperry, founder and cheif software engineer of MRI, says MR-DOS is aimed at the user "who thinks that the Unix environment is a room near the entrance to the harem and that Xenix is the Marx brother that no one can ever remember."
Instead of the traditional "A>" prompt, MR-DOS responds with the message "Well?" and the sound of impatient foot-tapping. The Help function suggests that the user read the 1466-page manual (provided at substantial extra cost).
Memory-management techniques are said to be state of the art. The booter sits on top of the CCP, which places the BDOS somewhere under the BIOS, in the middle of the TPA but NOT in the ROM. Headerless code in the stack registers supports overlapping segmentation standard 256-byte addressable chuncks. The allocation tables are bit-mapped to the interrupt vectors, not to mention calls to the I/O drivers from the duck blind behind the printer ports.
MR-DOS is sold in two configurations, a lower-priced edition for the novice user caled Fast Eddie ad a high-end edition known as Big Al. Fast Eddie provides the purchaser with both a version number and a complete sign-on message. Big Al features Marginal's System Programmer's Application Module, or S.P.A.M., a collection of futilities and infinite regresses. Purchasers of MR-DOS receive a personalized case history of their particular version and a certificate of adoption suitable for framing.
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