[fsckboy]

CP/M was written to do what DEC's minicomputers did with PIP, the peripheral interchange program was designed to create a way for programs to interact with devices (printers, console, modem, etc.) in a generalized generic way. BASIC didn't do anything like that, it was designed to create the BASIC virtual machine and in order to do I?O you would need to know what type of device you were talking to and follow its control language, exactly what CP/M was trying to eliminate. The people sharing Digital minicomputers would be attracted to running on a microcomputer all to themselves, but the software they would want to bring was not written in BASIC.

MS-DOS was written to do what CP/M did.