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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 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
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.
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.
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.
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