ummm.....no i am not arguing that TRSDOS is better *today*,,,,,my argument it was better yesteryear, yesterday, today and tomorrow.
As to being vaguely like UNIX, well I guess that is in eye of beholder. But to assembly programmerers on both platforms, there is a bell that seems to ring in background when reading Soltoffs books or code.
Roy put a great deal of effort ('blood, sweat, and tears' even) into the TRS-80 community. I have a great deal of respect for what he was able to do. I have attempted to reach out to him a couple of times over the decades, but have never gotten a response. Others who have gotten responses tell that he had at that time no interest in reliving what must have been very disappointing days as the TRS-80 market dried up. He is still out there as far as I know.
Heck I dont know and would not know him if he walked in door. Maybe he hated UNIX and wanted nothing to do with any of it and its all my immagination (that is possible).
While I can't and won't try to speak for him, I will say that you won't find anyone who was any more passionate about the TRS-80 Model 4 and LS-DOS even all the way into the early 1990's than I was. When my old non-GA Model 4 was stolen from me when I was in college, I received an insurance settlement for it, and went to Radio Shack and bought a new Model 4D. The salesman thought I had lost my mind by not getting a Tandy 1000 or 3000 (this was 1988). But no, I wanted a 4, even though I got enough to buy a fairly well equipped 1000. I finally had to sell it in 1992 shortly before I got married, since I would have much less space. It was a toss-up between selling the Model 4 stuff and the Tandy 6000 stuff, and the 6K ran Xenix (much superior for BBS communications, with the excellent pcomm software, as well as a solid Usenet implementation (C-News) and email via uucp, which were not available on LS-DOS), so I did two things: 1.) Kept the 6K and spares (a 16B and a 12); 2.) I bought LS-DOS 6.3.1A for the Model II/12 from Misosys so that I could get my LS-DOS 'fix' from time to time. The last thing I did with the 12 was make duplicates of my LS-DOS 6.3.1A for II/12 working disks for Tim Mann, back in 2000.
But I KEPT the LS-DOS 6.3.1A master disk; I am passionate about this OS.
But I'm a pragmatist; I couldn't do my normal stuff (such as post to VCF, for instance) if I were to only use LS-DOS.
So, I guess that gives me one more pro for each OS:
LS-DOS: a passionate user base, if small. There's a lot can be done with the bare OS alone.
CP/M: a much broader user base that is still pretty passionate about the OS, but more interested in the large application software catalog. Broad application availability is more important since the OS is really minimal.
When I found Tim Mann's xtrs I was pretty happy that I could run my TRS-80 software (I sold only the master disks of the Model 4 software; I kept my backups) on my more modern machines, and proceeded to archive my disks to DMK and I still every once in a while fire up the SDLtrs or trs80gp emulator (I have used both, although I find the trs80gp UI better and it can run Model II/12/6K stuff) and enjoy some nostalgia. Doing the same with a modern-built board such as the Min-eZ or eventually the Z280RC is a bit closer to the old feel; and again I do really appreciate what you have done in this space.
So I guess part of the reason I started this thread is to maybe put into black-and-white why someone would go to the effort of even bothering with LS-DOS these days.
According to what I've read, Roy has had a good career in software development and management since the closing of Misosys, but I can understand him not exactly having good memories of that time.