ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast

Ron Bieber, SmartDOS

Ron Bieber was involved with the creation and marketing of SmartDOS, an alternative DOS that was bundled with disk drives from Rana and Astra, and also sold by Sears stores. SmartDOS'swas the first disk operating system to be "Density Smart" — automatically changing between the disk drive's density modes depending on the disk used.

This interview took place on March 4 2015.

Teaser quotes:

"So I decided that instead of trying to sell the program, I want to be paid for every single floppy disk drive that a manufacturer makes."

"It was designed for sort of a moment in time, and the goal was not to keep evolving it as new hardware became available. It was to fulfill the need at that time."