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MS-DOS Paternity Dispute Goes to Court

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the dos-padres dept.

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."

2 of 483 comments (clear)

  1. QDOS was as CP/M compatible as possible by Husgaard · · Score: 5, Informative
    The way I originally was told the story, QDOS got this name because it was meant as a quick-n-dirty OS for the 8086 until a real OS came up.

    It's main purpose was to be as compatible as possible to CP/M to faciliate fast porting of CP/M applications to QDOS.

  2. Re:I'd be proud.... by ChuckOp · · Score: 5, Informative
    Nonsense. There were plenty of real OSs around at the time, running on similar processors. The prime example is CP/M.

    CP/M-86 wasn't available until after IBM committed to shipping MS-DOS licensed from Microsoft.

    MS-DOS dominated the market for one reason and for one reason only -- IBM chose it as the main OS for the PC

    You make it sound as if customers dind't have a choice. IBM announced and made available three operating systems - PC-DOS, CP/M-86 and UCSD P-System.

    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.

    If IBM made PC-DOS as "the main OS" for the PC, it was because it was available earlier and had lots of programming languages available. Customers also liked it because it was cheaper.

    since the lawsuit is over whether QDOS was a "slapdash clone" of CP/M. Which, in point of fact, it was.

    A clone with a completely different file system? There were plenty of CP/M clones in those days, QDOS, later 86-DOS, later MS-DOS wasn't really a clone. It just offered a familar API set for programs porting from CP/M.

    the biggest of which was using one of the worst OSs ever made. Not by today's standards, but by the standards then.

    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.

    In no way did Tim Patterson rip off CP/M. It is exceedingly clear from several respecible published sources that DR shot themselves in the foot time and time again, while Microsoft delievered not only a operating system, but the programming languages for it - which was the real draw.