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MS-DOS Paternity Dispute Goes to Court
theodp writes "Might be more interesting as a Who's-My-Baby's-Daddy? segment on Maury, but a Court has been asked to decide the parentage of MS-DOS. Tim Paterson, whose operating system 86-DOS (aka QDOS) was sold to Microsoft in 1980, is suing author Harold Evans and Time Warner for defamation. In his book They Made America, Evans devoted a chapter to the late, great Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research, describing Paterson's software as a 'rip-off' and 'a slapdash clone' of Kildall's CP/M."
I'm... I'm confused... somebody wants to admit they created MS-DOS?
describing Paterson's software as a 'rip-off' and 'a slapdash clone' of Kildall's CP/M.
m l
Meanwhile, Bill is organizing an army of lawyers, and suddenly "Oh wait, they aren't talking about me!".
http://www.mackido.com/History/History_DrDos.ht
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
There is nothing funnier that two geeks in a slap fight.
i wonder if bill gates will admit he ripped off whoever wrote ms-dos for millions?
Good Karma, Bad Karma, doesnt matter to me... I'm still going to say whats on my mind!
I'd be suing over the title of the book -- correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft didn't build america. In fact, I'm pretty sure America was already quite well established by 1980, seeing as how they it was a global superpower at the time.
Who really cares who made DOS? Is anyone still making money off of it? I don't think it is for bragging rights...
It's main purpose was to be as compatible as possible to CP/M to faciliate fast porting of CP/M applications to QDOS.
...I thought it wasn't defamation if it was true.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
It's less confusing if you remember that Patterson still thinks his lame little effort is as good an OS as CP/M. What boggles the mind is that nobody has managed to disabuse him of this notion. I guess the dude has a lot of self-esteem tied up in this little illusion!
... OK, Bill isn't the biological father, but he's still damn proud.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
but I woundn't expect a homie fan to get that right either.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I thought Gore invented DOS!
Not only did Tim Patterson, creator of Q-DOS for Seattle Computer Products, make Bill Gates a man worth fifty billion dollars, even more portentously, Tim Patterson helped out in the solution to artificial intelligence. Back then, Mentifex here was working out the eventual solution to AI on a theoretical basis, and also attending monthly meetings of the Northwest Computer Society in Seattle WA USA - where Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products was an important member. One day at a meeting, the chair asked for volunteers to work on the newsletter. Mentifex was panic-stricken. He wanted to do his part, but he was so-o-o busy solving AI. The silence hung heavy over the room. Then, the all-around good-guy Tim Patterson raised his hand and volunteered to work on the newsletter. As arguably a result, Microsoft would take over the desktop, and Mentifex would solve AI.
Now, about Gary Kildall of Digital Research. In 1981, Gary Kildall published an article in Byte Magazine. Consequently Mentifex wrote to Digital Research and offered them a copy of November Magazine containing first-ever publication of the Mentifex Theory of Mind. Gary Kildall's office manager wrote back and requested that two copies be sent. They were. Nothing happened. Gary Kildall had missed out not only on MS-DOS but also on Mentifex AI.
The book / film is about American inventors / innovators / corporate moguls for the last 200 years. Microsoft is in there because, like it or not, their OS has been the predominate one over the last 20 years. The book also discuss things like the steam engine and modern banking. Stop being an ass and find something useful to complain about, like how the book claim this guy's work underlies "every computer application today".
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
Funny, I heard that Unix is a 'rip-off' and 'a slapdash clone' of Multics. Is that true?
I couldn't give a toss,
who made MSDOS,
All I know,
is I broke my toe,
kicking the damn computer out the (MS) Window,
when once again,
I'd rather have used a pen,
to write down all my precious source code.
Amen.
He didn't get some of MS's money...
Or maybe he gets some satisfaction out of the fact that he helped create the largest monopoly the world has ever seen.
Sad really...
Ray
Maury: "Mr. Gates, you are NOT DOS's father!" Bill: "Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I done TOLD you it ain't my baby!"
Face it, do something enough times, and it can cause problems.
Does this mean we're going to have 6 other people showing up and claiming parentage too? And if someone sold MS-DOS when it wasn't theirs, how much do you think the original owner's going to get? I mean, if it was the jumping-off point of Windows, that could be a hefty lawsuit...
Speaking of which, why did it take so long to come out? Was the original programmer hiding under a rock for the past decade and a half?
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
I mean, honestly, who would actually want to claim paternity?
*points to Bill Gates* Your kid, not mine.
Thing should have been aborted, or at least shot when pulled mewling and bloody from the womb. World'd be better off.
I thought Gore invented DOS!
Nah; he didn't claim to have invented the internet either...
Although, as I was going through that I thought "Was Gore really in politics as far back as the late 1960s"?
To which the article actually points out the answer is "no"; so Gore was still stretching things in claiming that he was responsible for fostering the environment in which the Internet was "born".
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
C>
A>
I've never heard anyone claim that Paterson lifted any code from CP/M, just that he wrote a clone of CP/M, instead of designing his own operating system. It was obvious that much of the design of QDOS was done by reading the documentation for CP/M. There's nothing illegal about that. Many people did the same thing to UNIX.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
CP/M didn't keep track of the exact size of a file, just the number of 128-byte blocks allocated to it. This was OK for text files. You knew when you got to the end because you'd read a Ctrl-Z. But binary files could have Control-Zs in them anywhere, so all programs that read/wrote binary files had to store actual size - what should have been metadata - either as a header or in a separate file. Very un-Unix-like. But then, CP/M was a ripoff of RT-11, DEC's LSI-11 starter OS.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
Didn't Microsoft destroy a whole lot of documents related to another DOS maker after the settlement of a lawsuit? I always thought Microsoft wanted to obscure DOS' origins as much as possible.
I vaguely remember a comment where someone was asking why a certain QDOS system call ends in a question mark or other odd character, exactly like the equivalent CP/M system call which also broke the naming convention. I think it was in Robert Cringely's "Accidental Empires", which, alas, I don't have handy.
Remain calm! All is well!
They don't. They are so similar to MS dos commands that it can easily be said that they are sister OS'. File handling, executables, directory structure, even the commands themselves are too nearly identical to be a mear coincidence.
I think its as likely that compatibility with CP/M was MicroSoft's (and maybe IBM's) intention only after it had been aquired. Early CP/Ms was hardly even an "operating system" in the modern sense, more of a software "monitor." Its hard for me to imagine much variation between any such simple systems. I also beleive QDOS was designed for 8088, while MS rewrote it for the 16-bit 8086. But then again my memory isn't what it used to be.
Paterson has endured "great pain and mental anguish" and is seeking "over $75,000" in damages, plus costs.
It looks like Paterson is trying to get economic compensation (no matter from who) for the "great pain and mental anguish" of having developed QDOS, then sell it to MS for a ridiculous sum of money and seing how they managed to create a software empire with it.
It was, just what it claimed to be a disk operating system. It was very simple, very low impact. This was good, given the power of computers of the time. More powerful OSes actually took a noticable amount of system time. DOS took essentially none, since it didn't do anything but basic disk and memory services.
The problem, of course, is the same problem we always face: it stuck around for too long. Systems advanced and it became trivial to run a more powerful OS, and thus highly desirable, but DOS stuck around since so many things were DOS based.
However don't think that it's simplicity made it bad, that was actually one of the attractive things about it. An 8086 system is really, really slow and had very little memory. It was desireable to have all the power and memory possible available to the application. You wouldn't want to try somthing like a modern Linux kernel on it. Even if you could hack it to work, it would use up all the system resources just doing it's thing, leaving nothing left for software.
Linux (Linux Is Not UNIX) is a rip-off and a slapdash clone of UNIX...
mcbride - has 'rights' to code, sues IBM
paterson - has 'rights' to code, sues evans and time warner
Maybe jerry springer can do a show on frivolous lawsuits. I'd like to see the CEOs of each of the involved parties throw chairs at each other and punch each other silly.
I wonder if they'd get any brain damage. I wonder if some of them even have enough brains to get brain damage.
Then maury could do a show on CEOs that got brain damaged during a staged tv talk show.
At any event this is all (lawsuits included) about as productive as monkeys flinging feces at each other.
I have heaqrd that there are undocumented "-version" commands in QDOS utilities, wich when run say:
"Copyright Digital Research",
apparently just machine translated from the 8080 versions.
So what's their point?
In relative terms, we aren't talking about that much money ($75K). Lawyer costs are going to be that much. So this has to be a pride thing.
If they find that QDOS was a rip-off of CP/M, then couldn't Kildall's heirs sue? Instead of a $75K gain, Paterson could be looking at a multi-million dollar loss (in a subsequent court case).
Considering how close QDOS (and MS/DOS) is to CP/M, I'd have to say that this is quite a risk. If it were me, I'd say the hell with the pride issue and sit back and count the money that I had. Paterson's opinion doesn't count in court and I'd say that it's going to be pretty close to 50-50 when it's presented to a judge and/or jury.
I've programmed on both CP/M and MS/DOS (yeah... so I'm an old guy) and the BIOS calls are VERY VERY close. If I were on the jury, it would depend on how the letter of the law was presented to me during the trial as to how I would vote.
To oversimplify things a bit: Vint Cerf invented the "net" (TCP/IP), and Sen. Gore invented the "inter" (a commercialized, global network).
Thank you for pertinent details! I'd like to point out though that the lawsuit is about Tim Paterson's QDOS, not MSDOS. Its possible that Paterson just did some legitimate reverse engineering of CP/M commands, while MS ripped off more of the internals. I'd like to add that CP/M was originally made for the Z80, while IBM insisted its PCs have the 16bit x86 architecture (youngsters might be confused about a80 vs a86 extensions)
MS rewrote it.
Nope. The 8088 and 8086 were identical from a software point of view. Only difference was the pinout. The 8088 fetched 16 bits as two 8-bit reads, the 8086 read a 16-bit word.
Here's some extracts :
"QDOS was approximately 4,000 lines of 8086 assembly code and highly compatible with the APIs of the popular CP/M operating system"
"QDOS was developed quickly, but it lacked many features of CP/M. It was marketed as 86-DOS."
"QDOS met IBM's main criteria: It looked like CP/M, and it was easy to adapt existing 8-bit CP/M programs to run under it"
Let's review some interesting facts:
t /04_43/b3905109_mz063.htm).
o s_paternity_dispute/).
1) Patterson sold his QDOS to Gates for $50,000, whereas Kildall sold his company to Novell in 1991 for $120 million, according the Oct/2004 BusinessWeek article (link:http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/conten
2) In his defamation suit, Patterson is asking for $75,000, plus court costs, per the Register piece (link:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/03/msd
3) The Register article includes a photo of Patterson's 86-DOS (QDOS) manual with the word, "Programmer", misspelled on the manual's cover.
There is a movie somewhere in there, but it's definitely not about ambition.
Sun and Fun
The 8086 was compatible with the 8088 -- there was no reason to rewrite QDOS for the 8088 to run on the 8086. Just like there is no need to rewrite code for the 386sx (16 bit data bus) to run on the 386dx (32 bit data bus.) BTW the 8086 came out first. The 8088 had 16 bit registers even though it had an 8-bit data bus leading some at the time to argue that the 8088 was also 16-bit. Having an 8-bit data bus made it easier to manufactor motherboards in what was at the time an 8-bit world.
Oh, and some of the directory tree-mapping programs had a REAL hard time of it, when I reset a directory pointer back on itself...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There's a rumor that if you type a particular secret handshake into MS-DOS 1.0, Gary Kildall's name pops up on the screen. That might be something even a jury could figure out. Speaking of juries, how are they going to get jurors who are able to determine the facts of this case, ie whether or not a particular piece of code is slapdash? They'll have to have a cadre of experts come in and describe what 'slapdash' rely means. I suppose that the lawyers for both sides will be recruiting on slashdot for expertise in that area.
Unfortunately AI was oversold- especially by companies like Symbolics Inc. You may have a different definition of AI than me, but making claims like "AI solved" brings back bad memories of East Coast business disasters.
If sofware patents were available back in the day that both Microsoft and Apple were doing their thing (Apple, it's revolutionizing, and Microsoft, its copying), I dare say that neither would be around in its current form, if at all. All of the ideas we see today, in their various forms of implementation were based on something. The software patent fiasco is quite similar to the copyright fiasco - all of the fledgling companies that made it big without copyright extensions, the DMCA, or software patents, have now raised the barrier of entry to some rediculously high level. We all lose, of course.
America was already an independent continent soon after it got loose from Eurasia and Africa some millions (billions?) of years ago.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
In short, Vint Cerf did something good. Sen. Gore sold it to the highest bidder.
Strange that nobody thinks so today, since it is still possible on all kinds of filesystems today with the right privileges. Probably our data have become too valuable to us.
From: korpela@albert.ssl.berkeley.edu (Eric J. Korpela)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: filename separator change in CP/M and MS-DOS
Date: 7 Jul 1998 01:47:52 GMT
>The legend runs something like this:
> 1. The first version of MS-DOS was actually QDOS from Seattle Computer Works
There is much ongoing discussion as to whether it was ever called QDOS.
There is a general consensus that at various times it was called 86-DOS
and SCP-DOS. I belive the real name of the company whas Seattle Computer
Products.
> 2. QDOS ("Quick & Dirty OS") was an unauthorized port of CP/M to x86.
> CP/M ran on Z-80's.
There is little doubt that it was an unauthorized port. (In the US, at least)
No authorization is required to reverse engineer a product. There is much
debate about whether an of the "port" was accomplished by running a disassembly
of CP/M through Intel's 8080->8086 assembly code converter. (This would
be illegal in the US).
The typical (apocryphal) story is one of special key sequences that would
bring up a Digital Research Incorporated copyright notice in early versions
of DOS. (At this point, I've never seen a special key sequence that would
bring up such a notice in any real CP/M version.)
BTW, the CP/M version in question was written to run on the Intel 8080
chip. The ability to run it on the Z-80 was a consequence of the Z-80
design, not vice versa.
> 3a. CP/M used "/" as the separator between components in pathnames
False
> 3b. alternative version: CP/M did not have directories, so did not need or
> use any kind of slash as a pathname piece separator.
The alternative version (3b) is correct here. CP/M did not have directories
other than numbered user areas. In CP/M the '/' character is for command
switches, a trait it inherited from Digital Equipment Corp operating systems
on which it was patterned.
> 4a. QDOS and hence MS-DOS used "\" as the pathname separator to disguise
> the origin of the ripped-off software (unauthorized port from CP/M).
False, this is far too little to disguise the nearly identical APIs of
CP/M and early versions of DOS.
> 4b. alternative version: CP/M and hence QDOS and MSDOS used "/" as an
> option separator to commands, hence it was not available for use
> as pathname separator.
Correct.
Eric
I thought it wasn't defamation if it was true.
America has gone litigation-mad.
Defamation, historical inaccuracy and other kinds of misrepresentation can be important enough to litigate over, but this particular issue is just plain ridiculous.
"The law does not concern itself with trivialities."
The judge should just throw this out immediately and sternly warn both sides not to waste the court's time.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I have little sympathy for Tim Paterson. He stole another person's idea (i.e. CPM/86) and tried to make money off of it by selling the product (i.e. QDOS) to Bill Gates. Gates then signed an agreement with IBM to distribute a copy of MSDOS (renamed from QDOS) on each IBM PC. This agreement transformed Microsoft into a multi-billion company.
Gary Kildall missed the boat on this one. His lack of business acumen resulted in him losing the fame and fortune that Gates stole. IBM actually made an offer to Kildall, but Kildall dallied and finally refused the offer.
If history had accorded the fame to Gary Kildall but the riches to Bill Gates, Kildall would likely not have been so bitter and would likely still be alive today. Kildal deserved all the fame, for his ideas (which Paterson stole to build QDOS) became the basis of the modern PC operating system. Indeed, the computer science building at Stanford University should be called the "Kildall Building", not the "Gates Building".
A similar analogy could be made with Linus and Linux. The management of RedHat and other Linux distributors make all the money, and Linus just gets the fame. We all cheer Linus whenever we meet him. Even though Linus is not a billionaire, the warmth of us geeks acknowledging his brilliance is worth a million bucks.
By contrast, Kildall did not even get the fame, i.e. the recognition that he deserved. Ask any Windows/MS-DOS user who Kildall is, and she will scratch her head with ignorance. If I were in Kildall's shoes, I would have been bitter every day of my life and would have probably committed suicide too.
I am not one to believe in god or any afterlife, but if there were a hell, I hope that there is a special version of hell just for "bad" geeks. Both Gates and Paterson belong in it.
Sorry for the tirade, but I myself have been ripped off along the lines of what happened to Kildall. So, I can know how he felt on the day of his death. I hope that none of you is ever ripped off in the same way. The bitterness could kill you.
"slapdash" code you're talking about? Is Slashdot forking? Does it have a catchy ASCI art logo?
Luckily the bidders are interested in paying for all of us to use the thing. Gore didn't do anything better than the DoD or Cerf or whoever you want to credit with the initial creation of the internet. Personally I would give that to whoever convinced and/or inspired someone in charge of money in ARPA to spend it on networking computers. THEY are my personal hero, except I don't know who they are.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually he specifically has QDOS on his resume. Although MSDOS is quite derivative, from the start MS insisted that they made substantial changes. Stretching the resume analogy, Its a bit like going through 3 years of a university, dropping out and completing your degree a the local community college. He did the major leg-work, but he can't claim to have graduated from university he started at.
I thought QDOS stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System".
I'm seriously.
How many here are old enough to have ever used CP/M?
I used it as recently (warning: geezer alert!) as 1986, and definitely liked it better than DOS.
Anyone who has only been exposed to GUI-based environments just can't appreciate the simplicity of an efficient command-line OS.
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
A fellow I once worked with got his CP/M version of Wordstar to work on MS-Dos by hex editing one byte.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Only on Slashdot could notorious net.kook Mentifex get called "informative". Morons.
Quite right! Do you know how compatible z80 and Intel chips were? I think the z80 had a larger instruction set. I only remember CP/M running on z80. IBM offered CP/M for PCs at an inflated price, so I never even looked at it.
Yes, it was in Cringely's book, but the quote from Kildall was, "Ask Bill why function code 6 ends in a dollar sign. No one in the world knows that but me."
See this link http://dfarq.homeip.net/article/1197
DOS was great for completely destroying a system with a few simple lines of code. Ahh yes, and job security through obfuscated code... those were the days
Yeah, I think you're right. The z80 had a larger instruction set. Digital Research (originally called Intergalactic Digital Reasearch!) has an interesteing story more history at http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM
And yet here we are in the GNU/Linux age, compiling device drivers directly into the kernel. Ironic to think that DOS still has one thing over the Linux kernel.
There's an interesting History of MS-DOS By: Leven Antov at http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM
History of MS-DOS by Leven Antov http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM 'nuff said
Yeah, he sold it to those companies who brought a good educational system and allowed individuals to have it in their home, even if they wern't college students at the time! He took a system that only a few people could use for writing research paper and made it some kind of global communications medium, like we really needed a way to communicate with people in other countries.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
The market at the time was mostly hobbyists. At the time the vender of CP/M (Gary Kildall's company) was calling itself "Intergalactic Digital Research." The opposite end of the spectrum from "quick and dirty," but at least as unprofessional.
> In short, Vint Cerf did something good. Sen. Gore sold it to the highest bidder.
Hey twit: Al Gore was responsible for the creation of NREN, the successor to NSFNet, which funded a new and BETTER research backbone while the creaky remnants of the obsolete NSFnet could go commercial so YOU could post your dumb opinion to slashdot.
MS-DOS is just a Disk Operating System. The Atari 800 OS, in contrast, provided things like a screen editor (also made available as an I/O device that you could dump to), predefined graphics modes (i.e. given the high-level command, "give me mode 7 (160x96)," set up all the hardware registers and a memory map), and floating point math routines. The Atari DOS was separate from its OS. One might say that the Atari ROM OS is analogous to the PC ROM BIOS, but as described, the Atari OS went way beyond "basic input/output".
Paterson could argue that portions of the rights were retained and Microsoft illegally contributed QDOS technologies into their Windows and OS/2 products. Maybe even DR-DOS contains his technologies and millions of lines of his code as it is just an implementation of QDOS. Odds are that the agreement is that old and forgotten that no-one has all the details anymore and it would be hard to refute lots of allegations.
Were Paterson as deranged as SCO, he could even offer all Windows an introductory licence offer for $700 and sue IBM because OS/2 has coincidental contact with DOS. He could own the whole world Muhhahaha!!!!
There as much (possibly more) merit as the SCO case, but I predict that you will not see FUD peddling about Windows users being sued.
Handy Windows FUD creation kit:
while(<www.sco.com>) {
s/SCO Unix/QDOS/g;
s/Linux/Windows/g;
s/BSD/DR-DOS/g;
}
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I think you need to read more about patterson.
First off, he didn't get rich from QDOS.
Second, he made a clone of CPM, because CPM was overpriced.
Read the history of Linux. Linus made a clone of Unix because Unix was overpriced.
So why is one guy good and the other guy bad?
Kildall didn't become a billionaire, but the guy made millions in his life from CP/M. Its too bad he lost it and died that way, but that's not Gates or Patterson's fault.
In fact, there is no fault here. You're just being unreasonable.
My first computer job was on a systme running CP/M and it had many ways to bite you in the ass. So DOS learned from CP/M's mistakes and was a good OS for its day.
I don't see how they can say DOS is CP/M. CP/M was for the 8-bit 8080 and Z80 family chips. DOS was for the 16-bit 8086 family. CP/M was written in PL/M and 8080 assembly langauge, I believe DOS was all 8086 assembly language.
Also back then there were lots of clones of CP/M like Turbo DOS the CP/M clone for TRS-80's.
Another useless lawsuit clogging the system.
You ran cp/m on a z80 card on an apple clone- thats like the old skool version of running an apple II emulator on a pc emulator, etc... I miss how quickly the Apple II would boot up, even from a 5.25 drive. Good times.
Intertec Compustars running twin z-80 processors. What I didn't like about CP/M was that none of the compilers created fully operational programs, you always ahd to load runtime modules.
After 1981, I never went back to CP/M ever. By 1983 I had my own machine with PC-DOS.
Oh, and as I've heard it, UNIX stole from Multics via GCOS. (And took only the bad parts of GCOS).
That's great, time for your medication now gramps. Want me to cut up your food while you tell some old WWII stories now?
MSDOS does not do much compared to VMS or VM/CMS but what it does it does on an 8/16 bit processor running at a few MHz.
UCSD Pascal was a better designed system and ran on a 64kbyte Apple II at the whopping speed of 1MHz with a pathetic little chip called the 6502 that had three (count'em: three) one byte registers.
People were running multitasking operating system with tree-structured directory trees on hardware less powerful than what MS-DOS required before MS-DOS even appeared on the scene.
MS-DOS was a disaster, an embarrassement, a testament to ineptitude and inexperience. MS-DOS was IBM's attempt to cripple the PC so badly that it wouldn't compete with their real computers. They succeeded at the crippling part--too bad it got popular anyway and the plan backfired.
I guess I must have used MSDOS for about 15 years or so, much of that writing drivers etc.. For the CPUs available at the time (remember 4.77Mhz 8088 with 128kB of RAM) -- equivalent in CPU grunt to Pentium running about 100kHz, you could not pack in piles of stuff and there was no 32-bit or memory protection available to help with debugging etc. For what was going at the time, MSDOS achieved a lot.
MSDOS was written at the time when there was no C compiler (for x86) worth a damn and everything was written in assembly. There was also very little in the way of debugging assistance - nothing compared to what is available now. Few people could crank out something the size of MSDOS in assmebly these days.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Everyone knows that CP/M was a cheap knock off of Tops-10, which ran on the PDP-10 (dec-10). So, using the above logic DOS was a knock off of Tops-10.
He stole another person's idea (i.e. CPM/86) and tried to make money off of it
CP/M was a decent OS for what it was, but let's not get carried away here: it wasn't much of an idea. This was about two decades after multiuser operating systems, three decades after Lisp. People were using UNIX, the Internet, supercomputers, Smalltalk. Kay had designed his dynapad.
All the microcomputer hacking (CP/M, MS-DOS, Apple, etc.) was engineering--it was implementing and bringing to market other people's ideas. Many of the people who did it were "learning on the job". There was no rocket science anywhere in the microcomputer business, just people buying up cheap microcontrollers and building small, affordable computers around them and simple software for it. Sometimes they did a good job, and often, they did a poor job.
Bill Gates had already 'sold' the operating system to IBM for millions when he bought "86-DOS" for a few thousand dollars. Paterson used the same commands as CP/M, but CP/M also used commands from PDP operating systems (pip). MS claimed for years that substantial changes had been made to Patterson's operating system before they presented it to IBM. So Gates is actually much more to blame (Gary K himself didn't criticize Paterson, but had a lot to say about Gates) I think your anger is misplaced
Didn't SCO invent MS-DOS? :)
I strongly believe that they will win.
They have a good case behind them and a great deal of evidence to support their claims.
----------
Philip Catania
CCW
It was a major step in the direction that all OS' follow now. Without that history, much of the device layer we are accustomed to today, wouldn't be there.
MS-DOS came out in 1981. At that time, people were using 4.1BSD and Smalltalk (including GUIs and IDEs). The BSD systems not only had a flexible driver architecture, they had been ported to many different systems. Some versions of them even ran on 16bit PDP-11's. This was several decades after the first multiuser operating systems were developed. Silicon Graphics was founded in 1982. 4.2BSD came out in 1985, X10 came out in 1986, and X11 in 1987. You could get 386 PCs running UNIX around that time as well, for about $2000. People were using UNIX workstations.
There was nothing that MS-DOS did for the industry other than do grave damage for two decades. MS-DOS was an anachronism, as was every system ever built on it.
In fact, except for a bit of window dressing and faster hardware, fairly little of substance has happened in the last two decades in software: UNIX and Smalltalk from the mid 1980's are thoroughly modern systems, and people were doing pretty much the same things with the Internet they are doing today: chatting, discussing things, exchanging pictures, etc.
Many culture beleive there's a special place in hell for suicides. I think you need some counselling. You seem to be bitter, even if not "bitter every of my life." Is Fame really that much better or more important than money? Aren't they equally ephemeral? Being reasonably happy is so much better than having a lot of either money or fame. Posting on /. is not a very healthy way of dealing with these things.
I always thought that CP/M was a rip off from RT/11 that ran in PDP 11's. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT-11 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M Eg. CP/M pip (Peripheral-Interchange-Program) had the same syntax as RT/11 and much of the CP/M command line was the same/similar.
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!
MSDOS 1 certainly hard-code what the various devices were. The only thing you could open by name was disk files.
MSDOS 2 had huge improvements becasue at the time they wanted to merge it with Xenix and make a Unix system out of it. It had named devices and opening them as files would connect you to the device drivers. I actually implemented some of these, including what I intended to be a graphical windowing system driven by printing to stdout, it was actually quite usable and powerful.
Unfortunately that level of device support is pretty trivial. The Linux drivers you are complaining about have many more interfaces such as being able to allocate memory and mess with other parts of the kernel. If the driver was limited to read-block and write-block like the MSDOS-2 drivers were, there is no question that they would be completely independent of the kernel.
I don't think that story could possibly be true. Do you know how *small* the code for CP/M is? I would think it would be impossible to insert any sort of "easter egg", especially if the source was available. Possibly into a run-time program like pip, but that would just prove they were emulating CP/M well enough to run the original pip atop it.
MSDOS initially had the exact same problem.
MSDOS2 added a Unix style file i/o interface in parallel with the CP/M one and it would report the actual length of the file, which they managed to squeeze into the disk file system somehow.
Our text editor at that time had an option to not put the ^Z at the end of the file, if you were "only using modern programs". However there were still plenty of programs using the CP/M interface, some of them would even crash or read forever if there was no ^Z there.
ahhh yes I will never forget upgrading to an 8086 with 8087 math co-pro and watching the fractals almost *fly* off the screen...
;)
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
The Multics approach wouldn't have worked in all the environments UNIX thrives (look at NetBSD!) It would be just as "accurate" to say that Plan 9 is a "slapdash clone" of UNIX.
you had me at #!
Linux Torvalds however, quite blatantly made Linux borrowing many ideas from the Unix systems of the time, and he's heralded as a geek hero of our time. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Linus in the least. I think he did well, and I think that Patterson did equally well creating his workalike. Kildall's arrogance cost him the IBM contract because someone else implemented a cheaper version.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
earliest usenet messages on qdos:& lr=&ie= UTF-8&safe=off&num=100&q=qdos&qt_s=Search+Groups&s afe=off&as_drrb=b&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1982 &as_maxd=3&as_maxm=3&as_maxy=1988
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?hl=en
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
I : Used to refer to oneself as speaker or writer.
took : To assume for oneself
the : Used before singular or plural nouns and noun phrases that denote particular, specified persons or things
initiative : The power or ability to begin or to follow through energetically with a plan or task
in - To go into or onto
creating - To cause to exist
the - Used before singular or plural nouns and noun phrases that denote particular, specified persons or things
Internet - An interconnected system of networks that connects computers around the world via the TCP/IP protocol
It sounds to me like he was trying to claim credit for inventing the net.
the _fact_ is that qdos _was_ a ripoff of Kildall's cp/m, as anyone who happens to have the very old edition of wired magazine that includes an interview with the programmer who _wrote_ it under contract _to_ Paterson can read about. another fact: ibm paid digital research (Kildall's company) to avoid being sued over cp/m code found in ibm-dos (which was rebranded ms-dos). but since the records from the court cases involved have now been destroyed, and the outcome of cases in our legal system depends on who has the most money, Paterson will probably win. the truth is dead.
poor Kildall. robbed of his proper place by amoral bags of slime, and now even the history books can't admit his contribution without being sued by said slime bags' lawyers. an object lesson about how unjust the world really is.
rip, Kildall. at least some of us remember and will stand with you on judgment day.
If anyone here remembers CP/M, and remembers the low-level calls to the OS ("call 0005"), it's very clear that MS-DOS is a clone of CP/M (look at the values you'd load into registers before calling the OS).
I've never seen 86-DOS/QDOS, but I've seen MS-DOS (which, I believe, is admittedly derived from 86/Q-DOS). MS-DOS is clearly derived from CP/M, meaning (IMO) that 86/Q-DOS are derived from CP/M.
(If you've never programmed for CP/M, then you're too young, and can't really comment on the subject, IMO)
Gore said there was an initiative to create the Internet, and he's the one who took it through the United States Congress.
And he's right. He did.
IMO:
If you're old, mod parent up.
If you're young, mod parent down.
he was. if you have access to old copies of the Communications of the ACM (mid 1970s), check out their column "Report from Washington". Gore is mentioned frequently as one of the few politicians who showed both interest in and understanding of technology (iirc, he was representative at the time), and he was explicitly mentioned as pushing the idea of the "information highway", which eventually resulted in turning arpanet into the internet.
not being american, i didn't know too much about US politics then, but these articles were the first thing that came to mind when he got known during the presidential campaigns in the runup to the 1992 election
What I want to know is, what lunatic Idi-Amin-on-crystal-meth invented MAKEMEM?
Great reply man... & you're right, along with the other guy that stated writing DOS period would be a MASSIVE x86 Assembler task (probably alot of C too, but I have never seen the source, so its speculation on MY part).
I wouldn't REALLY call it an "Operating System", but a command interpreter with basic disk & memory mgt.
On PC's it was what I started out with circa 1991 or so & thought it was the best thing since sliced bread: Easy commands compared to UNIX ones (mile long switches nightmares many times), tons of programs for it (many freebies via the BBS circuit, remember that), & stable as ROCK! I can count the number of times I knocked DOS down on one hand, over 4-5 years using it.
And, contrary to popular opinion? DOS IS NOT DEAD! It lives on still in "industrial application" quite alot...
* Anyways! Great thread, for nostalgia @ the very least!
APK
P.S.=> I hope Tim Patterson gets his due... he didn't w/ Microsoft imo, but "Caveat Emptor" but in this case? The seller, not the buyer... apk
Bill Gates: Tim Patterson never told you what happened to your father.
DOS: he told me enough....he told me you killed him.
Bill Gates: No..*I* am your father
DOS: Noooooo...that's not true, that's impossible.
Bill Gates: Search your code, you know this to be true!
DOS: NoOOOooOOoooOOoooo...
Sycraft-fu
s pr og.html/ OS-9
> It was, just what it claimed to be
> a disk operating system. It was very
> simple, very low impact. This was good,
> given the power of computers of the
> time. More powerful OSes actually took
> a noticable amount of system time.
os9, written in mc6809 assembler.
os9 supported re-entrant code,
multi-user, multitasking, task
prioritization, running on a
->64k 8 bit machine, in 1979-.
The combination is fast. Very fast.
Very very fast. Especially considering
it runs on an 8-bit CPU! Observers are
usually astonished, as the benefit of
proper (ie, cleanly engineered) operating
system design is not widely known, and
certainly not widely appreciated, among
users of the commercially dominant operating
systems (eg, Windows and pre OSX versions
of the Mac OS).
http://www.phatnav.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=OS_9
other:
http://www.roug.org/soren/6809/os9sysprog/os9sy
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia
is/was nice. very nice.
34
...but didn't the original author of QDOS die alone and penniless back in 1985?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Maybe the defendant(s) should instead argue they did him a favor by lessening his accomplishment...
I mean, if I'd developed a highly sophisticated piece of software that I'd spent years carefully engineering, then gave it away for chump change not having in enough faith in my own accomplishment to recognize its true value to the purchaser, then I'd feel like... well, a chump. Lots of pain and anguish.
On the other hand, if I'd just spent a month ripping off someone else's code, then made a quick $50,000 selling it to the first suit that came knocking, I'd feel good about getting a good price for my week's work. Not much pain and anguish.
So by the author claiming the latter was the case, they could say they were lessening his pain and anguish: "Don't feel bad about selling yourself too cheap, you got a good price for what it was."
(Okay, it's a flimsy argument! Don't use it in court.)
For the record though, anyone who can write an OS in assembly, on primitive equipment, using minimalist compilers and debuggers, is a GOD to me, and should be given $1 million for simply being born.
Anyway, hopefully the publicity from this (extremely minimal) damages suit should give Paterson some more of the recognition he deserves.
At least his Wiki entry should get a bit longer.
I have used M$DOS versions 3.2, 5.0, 6.00, 6.2x, 7.0, and 7.1; PCDOS 3.1, and DRDOS versions 6.0, DR/NWDOS7.0 (patch 9 -- DR/NWDOS7 had *FIFTEEN* patches to address serious or fatal bugs), and DRDOS 7.01 and 7.03.
:)
Of the lot, M$DOS 6.00 was the most stable and bug-free -- in fact, the OS itself NEVER crashed in all the years I used it (my main DOS machine back then *averaged* almost 2 years between reboots, and then only for hardware issues). And it never exhibited any weird conflicts or self-induced memory leaks.
Conversely, DRDOS does crash occasionally, even with no apps running -- the DRDOS memory manager, while more capable and versatile, has some issues (its DPMI host doesn't leak as much as CWSDPMI or PMode, but it still leaks). The main advantage was that if an application crashed on M$DOS, it generally locked up the system, whereas if the same app crashed on DRDOS, you might get back a prompt (but memory would still be messed up, and it was best to salvage your work if you could, then reboot). Also, DRDOS had more oddball conflicts, again primarily due to memory manager quirks. And I found that the DRDOS EMM386 won't run at all on my P3 systems (it insists on hogging some memory addresses that the chipset uses, and its -exclude switch does not work).
Win3.1 was somewhat more stable atop DR/NWDOS7, but I think this was because 1) Win3.1x would not run at all unless the DRDOS DPMI host was loaded, due to some deficiency in DRDOS's EMM386 which I no longer remember the specifics of, and 2) likely the DRDOS DPMI host was more stable than the Win3.1x DPMI host (which apparently didn't load if it found a host already present).
I also benchmarked M$DOS 6.00 vs DR/NWDOS 7.x -- and found that M$DOS ran about twice as fast on the same hardware. DRDOS was still noticeably slower on a 486, tho not so much on midrange Pentiums. Again this was primarily a memory manager issue, but partly poor I/O. Some of this issue went away as of patch 15.
Novell lost the source for their 15 patches, so when it became DRDOS7 again, they had to start over with the 7.00 source. And DRDOS 7.01 was terrible (unstable and cranky). But by 7.03 they'd gotten the bugs worked out, and back up to the state of Novell's edition with all 15 patches, plus had got rid of a major bug in the DPMI host. End result -- DRDOS 7.03 is certainly the best of its line. It's unfortunate that it seems to be the last.
So.. here's what I settled on as the most stable, but not necessarily best-performing setups:
For pure DOS with no need for a DPMI host: M$DOS 7.0 (or 6.0 if no need for FAT32; they are otherwise functionally identical. Why not 6.2x? it has an I/O bug that is in neither 6.00 nor 7.x.) Note: I use this even on *very* old systems (XT thru 486), because it can produce the most available memory, and is the best performer of all DOS versions I've worked with.
For DOS and Win3.1x: DRDOS 7.03 or NWDOS 7.0 (patch 9 or later *required*; patch 15 preferred) mainly to provide the DPMI host. This will be more stable than Win3.1x on M$DOS 6, but will also run noticeably slower.
For DOS apps that need a DPMI host, or for the base under Win95 on first-generation Pentiums: base OS M$DOS 7.0, with the DRDOS 7.03 EMM386 and DPMI host.
PII and above, and for FAT32 support: M$DOS 7.x, and 3rd party DPMI hosts as needed.
If I had to pick one DOS as a mission-critical OS, where being absolutely crash-free was the #1 criterion, it would be M$DOS 6.00 or 7.0.
Did I mention that I resent rebooting, and never do so unless forced into it?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
There are a lot of similarities between DOS, CPM, VAX's OS (forgot name), and Unix.
The VAX OS certainaly had a lot of the same command names. They all kind of cross-borrowed from each other it seems. Tracing each command and feature back to its origin would be quite a task.
Table-ized A.I.
this is like an arguement over who gave birth to quasimodo.
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea
This is still true today. Linux isn't based on the latest OS design theory either.
hobbiests, not hobbyists. Learn to spell!
From time to time when Linux is not developing to fast it was a UNIX at some points of history. To be a UNIX you have to go threw a registration processes. Current development speed in the kernel makes it too hard and costly to register linux due to complete audits of all kernels(the god dam kernel keeps on changing).
Basicly in the furture it might be a register and be a UNIX again. TUX is not called TUX for no reason because this might be the completed name of Linux.
" rip-off of RT-11"
Yup.
RT-11 was a program loader. RSX-11M was an operating system. It was the one you used if you couldn't get a (real) UNIX license.
Having used (real) UNIX on the 70s, RT-11, MSDOS, CP/M were all inelegant painful low-rent crap.
Kildall was iirc, a hardware engineer, and knew enough assembly to be dangerous. He simply wanted to load programs from 8" floppy drives instead of cassette tape. It was not supposed to be an operating system - never use an "OS" written by a hardware engineer. If he was truly clever he would have added some bank switching hardware and written the moral equivalent of MINIX; it wasn't THAT much later that XENIX-286 came out. CP/M was a quick hack, nothing more.
In a world where you can download *nix and install it and run it the same day younger people have no idea how good they have it.
The roughly 10 year period when CP/M--MSDOS was "what you had to use" was the most painful decade of my life and writing MSDOS or CP/M was not that big of an achievment in a world when the UNIX system calls were freely available.
But I must say, MSDOS and the intolerable time wasting error prone x86 segment registers went perfectly well together. It was llike having both your eyes stabbed by white hot flaming steel rods instead of only one.
The Amiga had the first real OS on a computer you could buy in a retail store and part of its rabid popularity was it didn't run MSDOS or have braindead segment registers.
If I wrote MSDOS or CP/M I'd try to hide that fact these days as much as possible. It was an utter embarrasment to the computing world, then, now and always. MSDOS had only one thing going for it. It worked better than Windows. This is still true today.
Need Mercedes parts ?
"In short, Vint Cerf did something good. Sen. Gore sold it to the highest bidder."
If you dig deep enough you'll see you have that backwards.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Sinclair also had a computer out in the 1980's called the QL (Quantum Leap) which used an operating sytem also called QDOS. The QL was based on the Motorola 68008.
b outql.html
http://homepages.tesco.net/dilwyn.jones/aboutql/a
Amstrad PCWs ran a version of CP/M. I loved mine - it came complete with Digital Research Logo and Mallard BASIC.
My machine eventually had 512kb (a lot for a 8-bit microprocessor). You could swap 16kb of memory into using bank switching calls. Most of the time this was used as a memory disk by CP/M, though you could write some very hairy code which used this memory for its own purposes.
I particularly remember the way the screen memory was arranged. It used a lookup table (roller ram) for each character line (so scrolling could be done by just shuffling pointers around). In each line the bytes were in sets of 8 to represent each character (these were vertically arranged). It was quite hairy to work out which bit to twiddle to set a particular pixel!
With DOS 2.0, directories were finally possible. Remember - DOS 1.0 couldn't do directories. So, DOS 2.0 virtually copied the related parts of the UNIX C API with open(), close(), read(), write(), and ioctl(). At this time, there was no technical need to do that because DOS wasn't even written in C (the first release written in C was DOS 4.0 which bloated the installation media big time as most of you will remember), so they did it just for the heck of it. So - DOS 1.0 replicated most of CP/M's APIs, and DOS 2.0 added UNIX APIs. Compare this to SCO's ranting that Linux allegedly copied UNIX and you get an idea of the mind set of certain people.
.COM memory footprint? Ever parsed a command line from there? Duh. CP/M stuff.
So - The IBM PC used Intel CPUs that suffered from CP/M backwards compatibility (64K segments coming from the Z80 / 8085 era), and never overcame it, since even the very latest Pentium IV CPU boots up in the so-called real mode which mimicks an 8086 whose address space is segmented in 64K CP/M compliant address spaces; and MS-DOS copied the related 64K APIs. Remember the program segment prefix, i.e. the first 0x100 bytes of a
Had IBM chosen the M68000 and a better OS, many programmers wouldn't have gotten grey hair. Near pointers? Far Pointers? 5 different memory models in C or pascal? C'mon. Flat 32 bit address space, 1979. 68000 Amigas and Ataris were _way_ ahead of MS-DOS PCs at that time, but they did not manage to enter the office computer realm which made them fail economically. Today the PC market isn't office realm driven any more. How the world changes... . Anything else?
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
I wasn't badmouthing kildall; I have great respect for what he did.
And its too bad he wasn't able to do make CP/M the operating system for the IBM-PC.
But that's not Patterson's fault.
TOO LATE !!!
http://elks.sourceforge.net/
Some crazy people did INDEED try to run Linux on the limited original PC hardware.
We can now formulate the "laws of linux hobby projects"
1- As with any other stupid projet with "linux" in it's name (like "makinge coffee with linux"), there will always be at least 1 crazy hacker on the internet who'll actually try it.
2- Due to the GPL license, there'll be nothing to prevent the poor fool trying (and even successing) in his crazy projet.
3- There always will be someone even more insane who'll find an actual good use of said stupid project. ("Hey we could use ELKS in the embed market !".)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
In spite of the bulk of DOS/Windows users being male(& evily white), you could refer to them as female black crippled homosexual illegal aliens or some such; you know, spruce it up!
Gore is mentioned frequently as one of the few politicians who showed both interest in and understanding of technology (iirc, he was representative at the time), and he was explicitly mentioned as pushing the idea of the "information highway", which eventually resulted in turning arpanet into the internet.
Yeah; I guess you might be able to give him credit for making the Internet what it is today; if that's true, it'd be fair.
The way it was phrased made it sound like he was there from the beginning (Arpanet) however; which wasn't true at all.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Anyone know how much (if any) IP or code is still in NT5?
A blog I run for the wealth
Because Microsoft delivered a working product a year in advance, IBM wrote it's own programs around it. Also, DR charged a much higher licensing fee for CP/M-86, which IBM sold for $240. But there were no programming languages available for it yet and very little software had been ported over from CP/M to the CP/M-86.
Actually, for some time the IBM PC was an expensive door stop/status symbol. No wonder customers wanted the cheapest OS around!
The thing that changed everything, that sealed MS-DOS's dominance for a decade was the Lotus 123 spreadsheet. It was the killer app for MS-DOS, which made MS-DOS a must have. I was working for a company that developed CP/M software at the time, and sold systems based on an OS (TurboDOS) for S100 systems that was binary compatible with CP/M. These systems had many virtues, including running a pretty good selection (for the time) of accounting and office automation and supporting something like up to ten simultaneous users with a shared hard disk for the amazing bargain price of around $35,000e. But the question was always "does it run Lotus?" If it didn't, it was worthless.
Okay, well, what would have been better then for a macine with a 16-bit processor with a 8-bit bus and 16K of memory? Microsoft originally wanted to license XENIX to IBM, but it would never work on that type of machine.
Really? I'm not sure you've got your history right. Xenix came out in '83, which was two years after the IBM PC's debut; it was announced in '80, but it would not have been ready in time. However, 16 bit would not have been an issue, it targetted the 8086.
There were in fact Unix work alikes that targetted, believe it or not 8 bit microprocessors. I remember, for example, testing a system based on OS9, a Unix like operating system for excellent little 6809 processor (which in todays terms is PIC level stuff). It was available in '79, and was, for the environment it was in, amazingly good, although it didn't run Lotus and therefore was "worthless". I bet I could take a modern Linux developer and set him down in front of an OS9 machine, and while it would be incredibly restrictive, he could actually do some useful work on it. Try that with DOS!
In part, I think your post goes astray in forgetting too that IBM chose to deliver an unerpowered machine in order to avoid competing with its own midrange machines.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well, I weep for you. MS-DOS may have been written in assembly language, but CP/M - excepting a few parts like the BIOS - was written in PL/M.
And my CP/M-based Software Toolworks C compiler was one of the best products I ever invested $49 in.
You say:
Gary Kildall missed the boat on this one. His lack of business acumen resulted in him losing the fame and fortune that Gates stole. IBM actually made an offer to Kildall, but Kildall dallied and finally refused the offer.
How exactly did Gates steal anything from him? IBM came to Kildall and according to your own paragraph, he refused.
And good geeks have died broke for as long as there have been geeks. See Nikola Tesla / Thomas Edison.
Dear Troll:
What programming langauges did MS-DOS have?
Oh you mean MS-BASIC? BASIC a programming language?
Puuuuhhhhhhhleeeeeeeeeeeeese!
You're forgetting your history.
When IBM went with Microsoft, they didn't even have an OS, they bought DOS, if you were paying attention to the article, it tells you so. CP/M certainly had more going on, IBM standardized on DOS because Bill answered the phone when nobody else did. End of story.
None of which is relevant to the fact CP/M was far superior to DOS.
CP/M was so much better than MSDOS. I could not believe it when MSDOS took off. MSDOS's sucess certainly wasn't due to it's degree of usefulness. I used my Osbourne 1 for quite a few years.
No, you absolutely have it wrong. Perhaps you should refer to a source for reference. Your own definition even defies the proper use of the word. You describe interupting the currect task and scheduling the next. That may be what is called "Preemptive multitasking" at best, but not multitasking. See the dictionary definition here, http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Multitask ing. This states the following definition: "The concurrent operation by one central processing unit of two or more processes."
The key word here being concurrent. I think you are mixing up things like "preemptive multitasking", "Time slicing" and scheduling of tasks with the word "multitasking". Perhaps if you could find a resource that describes simple multitasking as something other than performing tasks concurrently, I would back off. I stand by my statement that an 8086 processor is NOT capable of multitasking anything, regardless of the OS that is processing instructions.
In fact, Windows XP, Linux, and OS X all use preemptive multitasking (as opposed to cooperative multitasking). The Wikipedia article on multitasking explains correctly how this all works and what the terms mean.
Given your claim that you were actually involved in the development of 8086-based systems, you provide an excellent illustration of what kind of people were building the PC: you didn't know what you were doing then and you still don't 25 years later.
If someone can be sued for calling something a ripoff or slapdash clone, think how many pro and amateur movie critics will have their heads on the chopping block.
Digital Research had plenty of languages: Pl/1, CBASIC, CB86, Pascal, and Fortran. All were available on CP/M-80 or 86.
I didn't say that there weren't any languages available for CP/M at all - just for CP/M-86 initially.
By the time CP/M-86 started shipping, it was several months after PC-DOS and it's languages were available. That was my point.
CP/M-80 would not run on the IBM PC, and is irrevelant.
Is WINE a rip off of Windows? Is Linux 1.0 a rip-off of UNIX?
If you say yes, then okay, QDOS (not MS-DOS) was a rip off of CP/M. I guess I define rip-off as having stolen source code and making wholesale copies of routines.
To my knowledge that was not done. QDOS presented a super set of APIs and the functionality was designed to match the functionality in CP/M-80 as closely as possible.
I see that as being very similar to what Linux did, which I don't consider a rip-off of UNIX.
Thanks for a great reply.
Anyone who ever owned a C128 probably ran it at least once, seeing as it came with the system, and worked on any Commodore-compatible disk drive (albeit best on the 1571). I know I didn't get a lot of use out of it, but I did run it on occasion just to play around.
Somehow I think giving millions to help children would outway being a bad geek.
NOt that it's an excuse for the behaviour, but theolistically something to think about.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Please research you topcis before flaming. Windows NT 3.5, 4, 2000, XP, 2003, longhorn all have no dos incororated into their kernel at all. You may be confused about the difrence between the DOS Operating System and the command interpreter, as they are normaly packaged together. Also, fyi, before it was called Windows NT, it was called IBM OS/2. For more clarification on the geneology of M$, look at http://www.jmusheneaux.com/index0B.htm it is a nice graphical tree of the evolution de-evolution of M$ OSs'
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into your own beliefs?
Linus is wealthy? thats it, Now I hate him and his crap OS! ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That aside, it would be very useful and interesting to know more about Killdall's court room demo. Knowing the case number, date and which court would make it a relevant citation.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
um, not clear about "née"- but CP/M-86 was a different animal that did evolved into Concurrent CP/M, MP/M and other varients. DR-DOS was a clone made specifically to compete with MS-DOS (turn-around is fair play I guess) I beleive Caldera bought DR-DOS, but never had any rights to CP/M-86 http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html
http://retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/d_dri.html# saga
Apparently it passed through Lineo and Devicelogic and maybe now Metroworks! I don't feel too badly for getting mixed up- I'm still not clear who has owned cp/m in recent years
There is really very little information on the web, even today, compared to what are in court records, court transcripts, journals, books, etc.
Even big web indexes like Google seem to hit less than 30% - 40% of these according to people researching web robots.
Then you have the issue of ranking algorithms. In Google, it's a popularity contest. If enough people link to a site, then it's important. If an important site links to a document in your search result then it gets a higher rank and shows up near the beginning of the results. If no one at all links to it, then it stays at the end and out of sight -- a self-perpetuating cycle.
I no longer have access to Lexis-Nexis or other law databases, nor to a law labrarian. If you are happy to consider the CP/M story an urban legend, then fine. Maybe it is. So are DRM and software patents, since no mainstream press write about those. However, if you want to know for sure, then check with a law librarian and search for the relevant court records (not transcripts).
There is a lot of "explosive" stuff not yet on the web. You can easily be the first to post it.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.