MS-DOS Not Stolen, New Forensic Analysis Concludes

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MS-DOS Not Stolen, New Forensic Analysis Concludes

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 7, 2012 @12:49AM from the sorry-to-disappoint-you dept.

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?"

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meh by kelemvor4 · 2012-08-07 00:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

I think it's interesting only as a matter of curiosity at this point.
1. Re:meh by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-07 01:24 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  I don't think so.
  Microsoft did purchase Qdos, and there are direct correlations between qdos and msdos. What the article asserted was that there is no cp/m in qdos, nor is there any cp/m in msdos. There certainly is plenty of qdos in msdos.
2. Re:meh by PRMan · 2012-08-07 02:26 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  He didn't even swindle it. Microsoft paid for it outright, source code and all license rights. So it really doesn't matter if it was exactly the same. It's not Gates' fault that the other guy didn't have a buyer like IBM waiting.
  
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3. Re:meh by bill_mcgonigle · 2012-08-07 04:58 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Now nothing was illegal - but my god. What a complete lack of any decent human characteristic.
  I'm no Bill Gates fan, but that's a hard case to make. He had information that both IBM and Brock lacked, and without that information, Brock might never have made any money on the product. There's no denying that his mother's connections to IBM folks made that happen for him, but he was the essential link in the chain (even if not a very talented one). It's those essential connections where profit happens.
  Gates gave SCP a decent payday (explicitly an acceptable price to Brock) and then gave Patterson a job three times, and bought Patterson's company from him. Heck, Patterson was such an early Microsoft employee that he could have made (did make?) a killing on its stock. SCP made healthy independent profits riding on the coattails of Microsoft's IBM-PC success, but then sued them for more profits, which only wound up in a settlement. Since we're judging all this in hindsight, Brock would have been better off joining Microsoft with Patterson if he wanted to share in its profits.
  
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Alternatively... by DWMorse · 2012-08-07 00:55 · Score: 5, Funny

Using his company's CodeSuite forensic software,
Alternate summary: CodeSuite found not to work as forensic software!

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1. Re:Alternatively... by rvw · 2012-08-07 01:00 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Using his company's CodeSuite forensic software,
  Alternate summary: CodeSuite found not to work as forensic software!
  Alternate headline: Microsoft acquires new research software suite
2. Re:Alternatively... by squiggleslash · 2012-08-07 01:26 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  More likely CodeSuite is right.
  I know everyone wants to believe the story that a devious Bill Gates simply changed the copyright message on a copy of CP/M and re-released it, but there are numerous issues with the story:
  - CP/M is tiny. Really, really, small. And has a well documented API. Anyone conversant in 808x assembler can put together a clone in a matter of days. This isn't an academic statement, I put together one myself for a A Level Computer Science course in the 1980s when I wrote a "CP/M emulator" for the Sinclair QL as my final project. (Appropriately the Sinclair QL's native operating system is also called QDOS. Go figure.)
  - QDOS wasn't even a direct clone. The largest - or at least most complex - component of CP/M is the file system - almost everything else is an almost 1:1 call to a BIOS routine. And QDOS didn't have CP/M's file system - it used FAT, not the somewhat inefficient CP/M system which, IIRC, required scanning the entire directory to determine where the free sectors were. So even if someone had started off with a copy of CP/M and directly ported it, 90% of it or more would have had to be rewritten to produce QDOS.
  The stories of Gary Kildall typing in some obscure set of keystrokes causing a copy of PC DOS to announce that it was actually CP/M - haha! - always struck me as improbable, and the fact they only appeared in dubious sources several years after this had supposedly happened makes me think the stories are outright fabrications. That doesn't mean there weren't potential copyright issues, and I suspect most of the stories of IBM somehow settling with DR over the similarities have some elements of truth - but this is because this was the early eighties, the era of Pacman lawsuits, to be followed a few years later by Apple's infamous look and feel suits against DR and Microsoft/HP.
  In terms of actual code being copied however - no. It would, arguably, have taken more work to translate CP/M into 8086 assembler and then make all of the changes necessary to turn it into QDOS than it would to write QDOS from scratch. QDOS had a similar API, and a similar but not identical shell. Otherwise it wasn't remotely similar.
  
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3. Re:Alternatively... by terjeber · 2012-08-07 02:05 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  More likely CodeSuite is right
  More likely, people haven't understood the original dispute. Did QDOS steal lines of code from CP/M? Most likely not, but nobody ever claimed it did. Was it a rip-off of CP/M? Absolutely. QDOS implemented calls identically to CP/M with the specific aim of being as close to CP/M as possible. In other words, as Patterson him self said, he read through Kildalls manual and tried to create something that functioned identically.
  As you point out however, he did a much better job on the FS, which is both to be commended, and also should be added on the "it was not a rip-off" side. DOS was an interrupt handler, and not much more though. As an interrupt handler it clearly "ripped off" CP/M to the point of being almost identical. However, not by stealing code. No stealing of code would have been needed (as you say) and that has never been asserted either. Not by the parties involved.
4. Re:Alternatively... by mwvdlee · 2012-08-07 02:31 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  but this is because this was the early eighties, the era of Pacman lawsuits, to be followed a few years later by Apple's infamous look and feel suits against DR and Microsoft/HP.
  Oh how the times have changed.
  
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5. Re:Alternatively... by squiggleslash · 2012-08-07 03:19 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  It used something that was later called FAT,
  
  I'm about 90% sure you're wrong on this. CP/M's file system doesn't really resemble FAT at a low level. FAT actually originated as the file system implemented by Microsoft's early stand-alone BASIC implementations.
  CP/M's file system was extremely crude, being comprised largely of a single table containing the directory, with the rest of the disk containing the data. Each directory entry contained pointers to up to 16 blocks, if a file contained more than that it had to have multiple directory entries.
  FAT has multiple tablers, and FAT's system is, ultimately, based upon chains of clusters, and the directories simply point at the starting cluster, with the information about the groups of clusters themselves stored in a separate table (the actual FAT.)
  They're both hideous, but they're not remotely similar.
  
  did NOT need to scan the whole disk to put a filesystem together
  
  I never said anything remotely similar.
  What I said, which I believe is true, is that CP/M had to read the whole directory to find out what parts of the disk were empty. Many of the optimizations that occurred between 1.3 and 2.x were to address this specific issue.
  
  --
  You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"The smearing of a computer legend" by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-07 00:55 · Score: 5, Informative

Literally in the process of reading a dismissal of that same analysis. See what you think...
1. Re:"The smearing of a computer legend" by Zaelath · 2012-08-07 01:03 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Andrew Orlowski is to journalism as Tammy Faye Baker is to cosmetics.
2. Re:"The smearing of a computer legend" by cnettel · 2012-08-07 01:05 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  From your link: "What is the evidence, then, that QDOS was a derivative work – a rip-off? The answer lies in the API, which describes how software can call up the underlying operating system and make it work for the user. The first 26 system calls of MS-DOS 1.0 are identical to the first 26 system calls of CP/M."
  Yeah, just like Linux and WINE are rip-offs. The need to map system calls by number and not only name was of course due to the fact that the actual calling mechanism worked by number. However, the IEEE article is still strange, since the matters described are already settled. On the other hand, the legend of DOS being stolen and not only a clone lives on, in some places.
Who else copied Apple? by tepples · 2012-08-07 01:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

Windows? -> copy of MacOS Classic
Any more than Android or GNOME or KDE is a copy of Apple products?
that's a relief by jjeffries · 2012-08-07 01:10 · Score: 5, Funny

"Whew!" said Mr. Kildall, from the grave. "I'm glad this slanderous attack on my programming skills has come to an end, and I have finally been exonerated."
Re:Seriously? by hazydave · 2012-08-07 01:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

The PET was a much better design. And back then, it was all good... in fact, Chuck Peddle (inventor of the PET and the MOS 6502) actually helped Woz on some critical issues to get the Apple I up and running. But Peddle had a whole system approach, thus, all the other chips Commodore made to support the 6502. If you look at the Apple I/][ or may of the other early personal computers, you usually see a Microprocessor, some memory chips, and a vast sea of SSI and MSI parts from the TTL databook. If you look at early Commodore machines, you find all sorts of integration.
But there's a vast difference between "inspired by" and "copied". And even then, in layers. Steve Jobs saw the Xerox Alto and got inspired. Apple didn't really copy the UI, they actually left out some of the good stuff. And of course, the OS they created was vastly inferior, and the internals had nothing to do with the Xerox system. Microsoft did actually borrow some of Apple's stuff, but they's because they actually did exchange code. Most of Windows had nothing to do with MacOS, and the OS design was not something any experienced OS designer would have some up with (eg, the OS treating an application as a series of callbacks)... and that's not even counting all of the serialization Windows did in Win32 to prevent real multitasking.
Windows NT, on the other hand, was directly inspired by VAX/VMS (via Dave Cutler), but also ran a POSIX API layer from the get-go. But that was a standard by then, so no really a "copy" of UNIX anymore.

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