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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."
Who really cares who made DOS? Is anyone still making money off of it? I don't think it is for bragging rights...
...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
If it comes out that this guy didn't have the right to sell Dos to them, then all Microsoft's subsequent OS's could see some additional legal issues coming up.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
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'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
I would. For the continued royalties you could glean off it alone. Secondly, in it's day, it was the best Operating system around for a PC, hands down. DOS brought device handling up front, to the user. 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. I was a professional in the field then and it's creation opened so many doors. It was a cool time to be paid to work with the stuff.
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...
Slashdot rule #2:
If you can't blame microsoft (rule #1), blame someone for trying to blame microsoft.
The guy is suing someone for defaming him. How do you make it out to be regret over a separate business transaction with a different company?
BTW, "from whom"
So what's their point?
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
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.
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
Gary Kildall eventually died in a bar, but many (including myself) would say that Bill Gates drove Kildall toward suicidal drinking, which lead to him being killed in a bar with other drunks.
[...]
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 think that saying that Kildall was driven to suicide by Bill Gates is a stretch. I know of Kildall's story, but I really can't bring myself to shed too many tears. Kildall was still rich by the standards of most of us. He has successfully founded Digital Research. There were many innovative and interesting things that Kildall could have done, either at Digital Research or on his own.
You have the right to decide to kill yourself if you were "robbed" of the massive wealth and fame of Bill Gates (you make the point that it is both, not just one that is the fatal poison). In this case, I feel sorry for both you and Kildall in holding such egotistical world views.
Money may not buy happiness, but it can buy freedom. The fact that Kildall is not recognized for a crappy little operating systems like CP/M and DR-DOS is really no surprise. Looking back on CP/M, MS-DOS and DR-DOS all we can really say is "thank God we can use real operating systems like UNIX, Linux and even Windows NT/XP". Xenix and the early UNIX operating systems were far better and ran on machines not much more powerful than the Intel 286.
Instead of being famous for writing CP/M and DR-DOS Kildall could have used the money he made to do something really creative. But he did not. The tragedy in the story is that of wasted possibility, not lack of fame or an extra 40 billion dollars. The inability to take advantage of what fortune and hard work had given Kildall can be laid at Kildall's feet not Gates'.
I suspect that the real problem is that Kildall had a drinking problem and was in the wrong place at the wrong time (he died, as I recall, in a bar fight).
Ok, I get it. In making an OS compatible with CPM, Paterson is liable for an alcohol induced suicide of CPM's author. As if that weren't absurd enough: in selling an OS compatible with CPM, Bill gates is liable for the death of CPM's author. That, sir, is laughable.
Sucks that Kildall was bitter (I probably would be, too), but blaming his suicide on Bill Gates? If DOS' success "caused" Kildall's suicide, that dude had other problems.
I hope you're never on jury duty.
Odd, but something is not adding up.
Gary Kildall eventually died in a bar, but many (including myself) would say that Bill Gates drove Kildall toward suicidal drinking, which lead to him being killed in a bar with other drunks.
and...
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 this is indeed the case, then Kildall had no one to blame but himself. He had every opportunity to do exactly what Gates did. Instead, he sold that oppportunity willingly. Ignorantly, but willingly.
Oftentimes success is not measured by how many times you come out on top, but rather how many times you failed and continued trying until you succeeded. Sorry, but killing your liver accomplishes nothing but what Kildall got, and deserved. It's ridiculous that you'd blame the death of the man on anyone except the person who decided on becoming an alcholic.
Should we feel bad for him? Certainly. But let's place responsibility for what happened where it belongs.
Who cares if Linus is or isnt a billionaire? He chose to make his project open source and use that business model to make his keep. There's no reason to feel sorry for him. Most of the geeks on this board would have nothing to write about if they didn't have Linus's work to sponge off of.
... I have this friend in Nigeria who needs you to hold onto some money ...
I suppose you also believe the old lie that Apple created the mouse driven user interface and claim MS stole from them, while ignoring where it really came from?
Give me a break. This is just more griping about why you hate the guy on top.
If more of you would stop the griping, and instead work on being on top, technology would advance 10x faster.
You were ripped off? how? did you invent 'happy o's' cerial right before 'cheerios' hit the market? 9 times out of 10, the 'ripped off' guy is a fool who gave away his idea/money when everyone else would have known better.
Which reminds me
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
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.
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.
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 #!
MS-DOS dominated the market for one reason and for one reason only -- IBM chose it as the main OS for the PC. Since there were so many low-level compatibility issues with early PC clones, IBMs competitors had to copy the PC in painstaking detail. That included copying IBM's mistakes -- the biggest of which was using one of the worst OSs ever made. Not by today's standards, but by the standards then.
I take exception to you calling Patterson a thief - tell me, what programming or design do you know of that does not use prior art in SOME fashion? Using an array is using prior art. Using linked lists is using prior art. Truly original ideas are very rare, at least in my opinion.
The command structure of much of CPM is a blatant copy of commands from DEC's PDP-11 operating systems. The internals are, of course very different, due to the difference in processors and hardware architecture. Is this not a usage of prior art on the part of Kildall? I haven't heard many people call him a theif.
Be Obscure Clearly
There are visual errors in time as well as in space.
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
You're right - it ran stuff faster in comparison to Windows 2.x or 3.x (I'm trying not to curse here), but I don't think that anybody who remembers how necessary autoexec.bat and config.sys was back then would say that MS-DOS was "the good ol' days."
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Pascal forced programmers to think before they started to write code, a habit that was odious and foreign to legions of brain-damaged BASIC and FORTRAN programmers. Microsoft BASIC was a poor excuse for a programming language. It made FORTRAN-IV look good, which is quite a feat.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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;
Ironically, MS-DOS's very flaws promoted this lock-in effect. Since MS-DOS started out as a CP/M clone, it should have been easy to write software that ran both on MS-DOS and CP/M. But MS-DOS was so flaky, MS-DOS programmers had to rely on thousands of little undocumented "features" that didn't exist on CP/M. Worse, MS-DOS didn't provide many basic services, and programmers often had to implement these features themselves, calling the IBM BIOS directly to do so. Which meant more lockin.
That statement is at such total variance with the facts, I have no idea how to respond to it.