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Microsoft Paternity Case Settled
Many readers have written to tell us that last week, a Judge dismissed the defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry."
The FCBs as a file access method were a sufficient easter egg in themselves. No need to add any extra easter eggs methinks. Compared to that the Unix ripoff of using integer filehandles in the later dos versions was a godsend. By the way the thing about the unix likeliness was proudly stated by Microsoft in the old MSDOS programmer manual. Yep. Those were the days when Microsoft was proud to be Unix-alike.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Not so sure of that- they ended up changing copyright law to get rid of those lawsuits, and today you need to prove direct copying of source code.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Well, quality of the end product is not irrelevant to market viability. But basically, you're correct. What's particularly irritating about QDOS/MS-DOS is that it's success was pure blind luck. Bill Gates himself wanted to use CP/M — he may not be the genius he's marketed as, but he knew a de-facto standard when he saw one. QDOS, by contrast, barely deserved to be called an OS.
TFA gets many facts wrong. One is the reason CP/M didn't get the favored OS status from IBM: Kildall thought the standard IBM NDA was to restrictive, so they couldn't even ask him for the product. It's true that IBM did offer CP/M (and also the p-System as alternatives, but their official choice was "PC DOS", and that's what made Patterson's insane kludge the de facto standard.
As they say, it's better to be lucky than to be smart.
In this 1,054 page encylopedia with forward by Bill Gates and printed by Microsoft it states in the first chapter titled "The Story Begins": "That's when Gates, who was still a student at Harvard, flew to Albuquerque, checked into the Hilton Hotel with a stack of yellow legal pads, and asked not to be disturbed. Five days later, he checked out of the hotel, yellow pads filled, and started typing code into a DEC PDP-11 mainframe, ... After five days, Disk BASIC was up and running on the Altair. ... The file-handling routines in stand-alone Disk BASIC became, in turn, the model for the operationg system that would eventually be known as MS-DOS."
If I recall correctly, Bill had to retract this at one point and correctly credit someone else. Gee, I wonder how much my encyclopedia is worth these days....(if I could only get bill to sign my copy...)
Jj