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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.
It's main purpose was to be as compatible as possible to CP/M to faciliate fast porting of CP/M applications to QDOS.
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 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.
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.
- 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
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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Sadly, he's the exception. The entire computing business (and engineering business, and any other business involving creativity and intelligence) is replete with stories like this. Kildall is just an unusually extreme example.
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).
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.
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
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.