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."

Comments

All those rivers in Egypt!

[fm6]

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!

Re:QDOS was as CP/M compatible as possible

[javaxman]

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

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...

Re:Clones

[Arker]

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.

I'd be proud....

[EmbeddedJanitor]

If I were Patterson, I would be proud. Some smug tossers who write a few lines of HTML or Python and think they're he-man programmers know shit -- writing something like MSDOS was a real effort.

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.

How soon they forget

[hey!]

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.