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."

Comments

Thrown Out

[Major Blud]

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.)

Re:Thrown Out

[arivanov]

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.

Re:Thrown Out

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

Re:Thrown Out

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Markets, not quality, decide predominance

[athloi]

It's a sad but iron fact of life that market viability and not the quality of the end product defines what lives and what ends up with the Amiga and other good ideas in the storeroom of history. This doesn't mean I like it. In fact, I'd like to live in a society where superior engineering was accepted over superior marketing. Any ideas? Will move, if there's even dialup internet access.

Re:Markets, not quality, decide predominance

[LWATCDR]

Sorry but not going to happen. It probably wouldn't be all that much better. What sells in the long run is what works. Windows for all it's warts does work for most people. Mac OS/X is selling because it works better for some people and Linux is gaining ground because it works for others.
If technical excellence was the only benchmark then Linux would also be in trouble. It is good but even Linux which I do like and use has it's warts. The difference is people are are free to fix the worst of them.

Re:Markets, not quality, decide predominance

[fm6]

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.

Credit where none should be assigned.

[Applekid]

So, wait, someone actually wants to claim credit for being the man behind MS-DOS?

In other news, No One Admits To Singing, Writing, Producing Nation's No. 1 Song.

Re:Great pain and mental anguish

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Why is America so ridiculously obsessed with trials, laws, and all that crap they love such as patents or imaginary property, to the point of turning so-called justice into an industry of fat, vicious thugs who make up anything to sue for a living, exploit ludicrous legal loopholes, or live on patents?

Because it was better than the previous option, where instead of rule of law we had rule of the retarded hemophiliacs that Europe choose to call "Aristocrats".

I do not think it means what you think it means

[monkeySauce]

Sounds like he was suing because they took away his fame.

But that would defameation, not defamation.

Although since we are talking about DOS, perhaps deinfameation would have been more accurate.

Re:Article bias

[Teun]

"The Register" is on par with Slashdot, quality-wise: completely unprofessional, and hype-driven.
And judging by your regular postings you feel quite at home here ;)

Patterson and others borrowed from CP/M bigtime

[postbigbang]

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.