MS-DOS Not Stolen, New Forensic Analysis Concludes

theodp writes "Challenging earlier assertions that Bill Gates got the rewards due Gary Kildall, a forensic analysis conducted for the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum concludes that the landmark MS-DOS operating system which Bill Gates and Microsoft licensed to IBM was an original piece of work, not stolen goods. Using his company's CodeSuite forensic software, Bob Zeidman said he found no evidence that QDOS or MS-DOS was copied from or was a derivative of Gary Kildall's CP/M. So, what do you think of Microsoft expert witness (pdf) Zeidman's "if-the-codebase-doesn't-fit-you-must-acquit" arguments?"

Comments

Re:Alternatively...

[DCFusor]

You don't recall correctly. I knew Gary, and had a copy of the source - it came with the dev system for intel microprocessors we used in the beltway bandit Ensco. It used something that was later called FAT, it did NOT need to scan the whole disk to put a filesystem together - couldn't, not enough ram in things like Xerox 820s and Kaypros to do that (would have been faster, though). I know these things as I built SSD (dram) drives for those back in the day, and had to rewrite the floppy driver to deal with that. Mostly used the bios? True - so did Dos, and strangely, both used the same int to get to it, or their wrapper over it. Far too many identical API's to think anything but that DOS was heavily copied in spirit at least, from CP/M, To move from Z80 to x80 was a trivial recompilation of the ASM, fixing only a couple errors where special Z80 instructions were used - I've done it, I know. Just like DOS, CPM wasn't re-entrant and didn't support threads, though I spent hours arguing with Gary on the phone about how easy it would be to do that - think how different the world would be had he listened. The fact remains that he did die conveniently in a plane crash just after failing to come to terms with MS. Handy, that, since yes, a heck of a lot of dos was virtually line for line copied from CP/M. It had to be to implement the very same API and still be tight - Gary was a good coder (and rock-headed, sadly). DOS simply added a few more built-ins. Basically, it was the same thing. At that level, yes, it's hard to see how it would have been otherwise, it was all pretty simple, and yes, I've written better opsys than those for my embedded work, including as the poster above mentions, a filesystem that DID need to read all flash to avoid write amplification with FAT type tables in flash - but that was for a machine that had a meg of ram (TMS320C31) and plenty of rom, which only had to boot maybe every couple of years (power failure only), so the extra boot time wasn't an issue. I was there, I know what went down. Microsoft's insistence that everyone else was a pirate was pure projection (ask a psychologist if you don't know what I mean here). They dumpster-dived to help them get their original basic as well - Honeywell...all they did was rewrite a reverse engineered version. But we live in a world where entire governments are the slaves of big money - I know that too, and them with the gold makes the rules...So I don't expect any truth to matter to any outcome here.