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Microsoft Paternity Case Settled

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the dos'-baby-daddy dept.

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."

5 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Thrown Out by Major+Blud · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This case really needed to be dismissed. Anyone who has ever used DOS and CP/M can notice obvious similarities. Still I think it was wrong from Evans to say that Paterson ripped off CP/M. Even CPM/M contains features that you could claim are rip-offs of other operating systems (file systems, command-lines, etc.)

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    If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
    1. Re:Thrown Out by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      My original JE on the topic:

      Apparently, despite Tim Patterson's denial, QDOS "ripped off" CP/M, specifically in the user interface, which in 1980 was the defining characteristic of software copyright law. QDOS of course was sold by Patterson to Bill Gates, who used it as the basis of PC Dos 1.0 and MS DOS, which was the creation of the monopoly that eventually became Windows.

      This is ALL about look and feel, which was 100% of the definition of software copyright in 1980.

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    2. Re:Thrown Out by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      At the time (yes I was there, the beard is going white these days) QDOS was obviously just CP/M for the 8086. I recall little ads in the back of...god what was the name of that magazine? I forget, lots of S100 h/w, can't recall...more technical than Byte, which was good back then. And no it wasn't Dr. Dobbs. The 8086 came out and all these S100 cards got made and people needed something to run on them.

      Nastier are the rumors that much of QDOS was really ripped off. Don't know the truth to that but Intel did provide an 8080/8085 to 8086 assembler translator which was used by many developers to quickly get IBM PC versions of their programs to market. It did a lot of the work but you were stuck with compact or small memory model, never used it since all my stuff was Z80 (3D graphics in assembler, fun!). CP/M source was available. Put one and one together? I heard something about Kildall asking why a '$' was used to terminate the string passed to the console output call and that only he knew the real answer (could be a hack to reduce code size which was the common technique those days - no caches so jumping around to share subroutine exits was considered good form and could substantially reduce code size, MS BASIC was full of that sort of thing, that Paul Allen wrote some good code, pity he got sick when he did, it could've been quite a different world).

      Anyway we can't change history, yet, so its not worth worrying too much about it. Its not like CP/M was any great OS we should lament. {MS,PC}-DOS v1 did add some useful things that you either had to hack into CP/M yourself or get an add-on (another thing who's name I forget ... that Z80-only add on that vastly improved CP/M).

  2. Patterson and others borrowed from CP/M bigtime by postbigbang · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seattle DOS was only one.... the source code to MP/M and CP/M floated around freely. CP/M itself is a re-do of RT-11, a horrible DEC OS.

    After the success of MS/IBM DOS, he started selling his own version again. It was less weird (compatibility wise) than versions of MS-DOS, but never really took off. DRDOS survives to this day in one form and another.

    Then Microsoft tried to make DOS realistic with subdirectories, and other 'inventions' borrowed from other places. The whole operating system industry was/is highly incestuous.

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    ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
  3. Re:Markets, not quality, decide predominance by OldSoldier · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Grow up! The sooner you realize the old adage "if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door" isn't true, the happier you'll be. I loved the Amiga, but a few years after waiting for the rest of the world to realize how wonderful that machine was I got the distinct impression that the powers-that-be at Amiga/Commodore were just waiting for the world to beat a path to their door.

    For any significant real-world problem there are at least 2 things that need to be solved. Call it "the core problem" and then "telling people that you've solved it", the technical side and the marketing side. Just to drive the point home even further, consider building a bridge across a river (tech side), but not interfacing that bridge to the existing road system (marketing side). Now imagine a somewhat less functional bridge (say 2 lanes instead of 4) but you don't have to go off-road to get to it. My point is... how many people would make the same complaint about the "demise" of that better bridge in a way that's analogous to the demise of the Amiga? VS how many people would think the bridge designers were idiots for not interfacing it to the existing road system?

    No, the things worthy of our pity are the failures that solved both problems and still failed in the marketplace. I don't think there are many examples of this, Beta vs VHS was close.