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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."
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!
Right, but the guy has a point that it was in many, many ways completely unlike CP/M
... in that CP/M had many more features and was, well, just all-around better... ;-) in that way they were completely different.
All kidding aside, QDOS was meant to be simple and 'quick' disk-based OS. Nobody ( OK, few people outside the p0rn industry ) wants to call their own software 'dirty'. That sounds like a story...
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 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!
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.
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"
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)
What I don't understand is that they were both a rip-off of RT-11??
If you'll remember the "pip" command from CP/M? That is straight out of RT-11, and other DEC OS's.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
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.
Well, here's the thing. CP/M licensees got source code. Microsoft had it. Patterson had it. Then years later IIRC, Killdall stood up in court and entered a keystrokes at a PC running MSDOS and brought up an easter egg he had programmed into CP/M years earlier, proving they had used his code.
As a result, he wound up getting lots of money and use of the MSDOS codebase to keep DR DOS compatible.
Patterson seems like the most likely source for the copying, but I've never seen that proven or any proof attempted.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
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
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 "ux" suffix was going around for unix clones at the time (HP-UX and DGUX to name two). Changing one letter of his name to make another "ux" was a pun that some roguish FTP admin made when he didn't like the name Linus checked his code in as: Freax. Linus liked it and it stuck.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
It's good to see somebody else who acutally *used* CP/M commenting. Many people just make 'Microsoft copied it, it must be far superior' assumptions without any real-life experience.
I, personally, liked CP/M and even have a machine here that still runs it. I am not so deluded that I think it is 'technically superior' for some reason, to an OS that evolved after it and had much more application support.
Oh, and I have CP/M-86, too. But not a heck of a lot of apps to run on it.
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.
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.
Windows, by comparison, is basically a microkernel. Drivers are completely separate from and independent of the kernel.
This is a security and administration problem for GNU/Linux, one that will hopefully be addressed in the future.
CP/M was certainly modelled after RT-11, but it wasn't a clone (for one thing, it was a far less capable system for far less capable computers), let alone an actual rip-off (i.e. an authorized use of RT-11 code). In contrast, there have been claims that at least parts of 86-DOS were directly copied from CP/M code; I hope this case brings forward enough evidence to clearly establish whether or not that is true.
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
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.
But it is somewhat ironic that you would point out the limitations of the 6502 to bash Bill Gates since he personaly wrote the code that made the Apple ][, the Commodore PET and most of the rest of the Micros possible, Microsoft Basic.
The Apple II was developed with, and shipped with, Integer Basic. Microsoft Basic was a later addition once the machine was already well on its way.
The market rejected Pascal because it was a piece of elitist crap designed to make students 'program properly'.
Pascal was designed as a teaching language; it was never intended to be used by "the market". That doesn't make it "elitist crap", it makes it a well-designed language that has been used wrong.
And Pascal was anything but rejected by the market: once the few things it needed for a real-world language were added, it was a huge commercial success: Turbo Pascal, Lisa, Macintosh, and one of the major non-UNIX workstation OS's were written in it.
That is the big difference between the geek elite and ordinary people. Ordinary people want to do a job with a minimum of fuss and the geek elite want to convert them to their way of thinking.
Bullshit. In the 1980's, there were computer professionals and then there were people who didn't know what they were doing. The latter promised easy solutions and failed to deliver--they didn't even understand the problems.
" 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 ?
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 ]
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.