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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."
I'm... I'm confused... somebody wants to admit they created MS-DOS?
describing Paterson's software as a 'rip-off' and 'a slapdash clone' of Kildall's CP/M.
m l
Meanwhile, Bill is organizing an army of lawyers, and suddenly "Oh wait, they aren't talking about me!".
http://www.mackido.com/History/History_DrDos.ht
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
There is nothing funnier that two geeks in a slap fight.
I'd be suing over the title of the book -- correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft didn't build america. In fact, I'm pretty sure America was already quite well established by 1980, seeing as how they it was a global superpower at the time.
It's main purpose was to be as compatible as possible to CP/M to faciliate fast porting of CP/M applications to QDOS.
...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."
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!
... OK, Bill isn't the biological father, but he's still damn proud.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The case has nothing to do with whether he had the right to sell Dos to Microsoft. It's only about defamation and failing to give credit in a published work.
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 couldn't give a toss,
who made MSDOS,
All I know,
is I broke my toe,
kicking the damn computer out the (MS) Window,
when once again,
I'd rather have used a pen,
to write down all my precious source code.
Amen.
Maury: "Mr. Gates, you are NOT DOS's father!" Bill: "Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I done TOLD you it ain't my baby!"
Face it, do something enough times, and it can cause problems.
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'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.
Al Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." This is true. On the other hand, when Bush disclaimed his timber business write-off during the televised debates in 2004, that was a lie.
Your (and my) posting on the Internet today is attributable to the role Gore played in creating the Internet when he was in the U.S. Congress.
Al Gore and the Internet
By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.
As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.
As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an "Interagency Network." Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush's administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This "Gore Act" supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.
As Vice President Gore promoted building the Internet both up and out, as well as releasing the Internet from the control of the government agencies that spawned it. He served as the major administration proponent for continued investment in advanced computing and networking and private sector initiatives such as Net Day. He was and is a strong proponent of extending access to the network to schools and libraries. Today, approximately 95% of our nation's schools are on the Internet. Gore provided much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially-driv
- jeps
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.
From: korpela@albert.ssl.berkeley.edu (Eric J. Korpela)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: filename separator change in CP/M and MS-DOS
Date: 7 Jul 1998 01:47:52 GMT
>The legend runs something like this:
> 1. The first version of MS-DOS was actually QDOS from Seattle Computer Works
There is much ongoing discussion as to whether it was ever called QDOS.
There is a general consensus that at various times it was called 86-DOS
and SCP-DOS. I belive the real name of the company whas Seattle Computer
Products.
> 2. QDOS ("Quick & Dirty OS") was an unauthorized port of CP/M to x86.
> CP/M ran on Z-80's.
There is little doubt that it was an unauthorized port. (In the US, at least)
No authorization is required to reverse engineer a product. There is much
debate about whether an of the "port" was accomplished by running a disassembly
of CP/M through Intel's 8080->8086 assembly code converter. (This would
be illegal in the US).
The typical (apocryphal) story is one of special key sequences that would
bring up a Digital Research Incorporated copyright notice in early versions
of DOS. (At this point, I've never seen a special key sequence that would
bring up such a notice in any real CP/M version.)
BTW, the CP/M version in question was written to run on the Intel 8080
chip. The ability to run it on the Z-80 was a consequence of the Z-80
design, not vice versa.
> 3a. CP/M used "/" as the separator between components in pathnames
False
> 3b. alternative version: CP/M did not have directories, so did not need or
> use any kind of slash as a pathname piece separator.
The alternative version (3b) is correct here. CP/M did not have directories
other than numbered user areas. In CP/M the '/' character is for command
switches, a trait it inherited from Digital Equipment Corp operating systems
on which it was patterned.
> 4a. QDOS and hence MS-DOS used "\" as the pathname separator to disguise
> the origin of the ripped-off software (unauthorized port from CP/M).
False, this is far too little to disguise the nearly identical APIs of
CP/M and early versions of DOS.
> 4b. alternative version: CP/M and hence QDOS and MSDOS used "/" as an
> option separator to commands, hence it was not available for use
> as pathname separator.
Correct.
Eric
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.
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
There's an interesting History of MS-DOS By: Leven Antov at http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM
Um, you don't have the vaguest idea of what you are talking about. Windows NT 3.5 right up to Windows XP are not built on top of DOS. They do not require any DOS commands or interrupts to work. In fact, their support of DOS is totally shitty as compared to the OS/2 VDM or the Linux DOSEMU system. I have a number of DOS programs that work great both in OS/2 and DOSEMU but don't function at all in NT's DOS subsystem. Whatever XP's flaws may be, it is not at all built on DOS, and neither are its predecessors right back to Windows NT.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
I always thought that CP/M was a rip off from RT/11 that ran in PDP 11's. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT-11 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M Eg. CP/M pip (Peripheral-Interchange-Program) had the same syntax as RT/11 and much of the CP/M command line was the same/similar.
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!
MSDOS 1 certainly hard-code what the various devices were. The only thing you could open by name was disk files.
MSDOS 2 had huge improvements becasue at the time they wanted to merge it with Xenix and make a Unix system out of it. It had named devices and opening them as files would connect you to the device drivers. I actually implemented some of these, including what I intended to be a graphical windowing system driven by printing to stdout, it was actually quite usable and powerful.
Unfortunately that level of device support is pretty trivial. The Linux drivers you are complaining about have many more interfaces such as being able to allocate memory and mess with other parts of the kernel. If the driver was limited to read-block and write-block like the MSDOS-2 drivers were, there is no question that they would be completely independent of the kernel.
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
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.
You think you're joking, but DR-DOS, née CP/M-86, was indeed owned by Canopy/SCO/Caldera for a time. They purchased it, like Unix, from Novell, who had previously bought Digital Research.
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
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;
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.