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Care to enlighten us? All of these claims are basically correct.

Technically speaking, MS-DOS was a rebranding of 86-DOS, which was a renamed QDOS.

86-DOS had a command structure and application programming interface that imitated that of Digital Research's CP/M operating system ... The system was purchased by Microsoft and developed further as MS-DOS and PC DOS.

Using a CP/M-80 manual as reference, Paterson modeled 86-DOS after its architecture and interfaces, but adapted to meet the requirements of Intel's 8086 16-bit processor.

Page 19, of the original 86 DOS Manual pretty much confirms 86 DOS came with FAT, not the CP/M file system or a file system in any way inspired by CP/M (beyond FAT's use of 8.3 filenames.) There are other references in the same manual that make this clear, but page 19 has the smoking gun.

Bah, GP doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Gates mother sat on the United Way board, and so did the IBM CEO. Some say this is way MS got the contract ([citation needed] for this) but MS at the time was already a well established company because of their Basic products.

And they did also owned QDOS at the time. Tim Paterson, the original QDOS author, even went to work at Microsoft later. It's not like they defrauded him or anything.

Kinda of interesting guy, Paterson. Worth reading: http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Softalk/Softalk.html about DOS and Paterson, hosted by himself.

Unix existed when MS wrote and sold DOS. Inexcusable.

Wrong. MS didn't write DOS - they bought it.. $10k for the right to sell it, + $15k for the sale of an OEM license to ... IBM. Total: $25k.

Lawsuits eventually drove the final price to $1M.

Considering that Microsoft made tens of billions in profit (not revenue - profit) off dos, ...

Microsoft paid a reported $75,000 for what became DOS 1.0.

Here's a history that seems accurate: A Short History of MS-DOS. See also Origins of MS-DOS.

See Myths About Microsoft. Quote: "... Microsoft gains some of its market share by shady back-room deals and by threatening and intimidating its own customers."

Umm... maybe DOS? Did they even actually make *that*? I mean, I was GOING to say Windows, but.. you know...

"And, as a fallback plan, they make products people want."

No, They don't. They buy them and resell them, abusing their large amounts of money to do whatever they please.
Microsoft Internet Explorer? Try spyglass (Part of MOSAIC).
MS-DOS? Seattle computer
many many more examples here (including hotmail, webtv, many others.)

Even their best selling game, Halo, was originaly advertised as a macintosh exclusive. I wonder what changed their mind..

And therein lies the delicious irony. The marquee name on this panel was Bill Gates, who probably programmed MS-DOS with his own personal copy of the Purple Book at his side.

Extensive interview with Tim Paterson author of the Quick and Dirty OS for the 8086 (QDOS-86) the OS MS bought from Seattle Computer to use on the orginal IBM PC.

Previously, Paterson also had done the first port of MS-Basic to the 8086 platform.

The 1983 article is both amusing and sad since the guy went back to Seattle Computer after MS-DOS 1.1 was released, and says how happy he was to get a director position there. I expect he'd be worth Billions now had he stayed with MS.

A look at his page shows that is is pretty much still a Microsoft shill.

- Sam