MS-DOS Paternity Dispute Goes to Court 483
theodp writes "Might be more interesting as a Who's-My-Baby's-Daddy? segment on Maury, but a Court has been asked to decide the parentage of MS-DOS. Tim Paterson, whose operating system 86-DOS (aka QDOS) was sold to Microsoft in 1980, is suing author Harold Evans and Time Warner for defamation. In his book They Made America, Evans devoted a chapter to the late, great Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research, describing Paterson's software as a 'rip-off' and 'a slapdash clone' of Kildall's CP/M."
Confused (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Confused (Score:5, Funny)
Re:SCO (Score:4, Informative)
All those rivers in Egypt! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd be proud.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess I must have used MSDOS for about 15 years or so, much of that writing drivers etc.. For the CPUs available at the time (remember 4.77Mhz 8088 with 128kB of RAM) -- equivalent in CPU grunt to Pentium running about 100kHz, you could not pack in piles of stuff and there was no 32-bit or memory protection available to help with debugging etc. For what was going at the time, MSDOS achieved a lot.
MSDOS was written at the time when there was no C compiler (for x86) worth a damn and everything was written in assembly. There was also very little in the way of debugging assistance - nothing compared to what is available now. Few people could crank out something the size of MSDOS in assmebly these days.
Re:I'd be proud.... (Score:5, Insightful)
MS-DOS dominated the market for one reason and for one reason only -- IBM chose it as the main OS for the PC. Since there were so many low-level compatibility issues with early PC clones, IBMs competitors had to copy the PC in painstaking detail. That included copying IBM's mistakes -- the biggest of which was using one of the worst OSs ever made. Not by today's standards, but by the standards then.
Re:I'd be proud.... (Score:5, Informative)
CP/M-86 wasn't available until after IBM committed to shipping MS-DOS licensed from Microsoft.
MS-DOS dominated the market for one reason and for one reason only -- IBM chose it as the main OS for the PC
You make it sound as if customers dind't have a choice. IBM announced and made available three operating systems - PC-DOS, CP/M-86 and UCSD P-System.
Because Microsoft delivered a working product a year in advance, IBM wrote it's own programs around it. Also, DR charged a much higher licensing fee for CP/M-86, which IBM sold for $240. But there were no programming languages available for it yet and very little software had been ported over from CP/M to the CP/M-86.
If IBM made PC-DOS as "the main OS" for the PC, it was because it was available earlier and had lots of programming languages available. Customers also liked it because it was cheaper.
since the lawsuit is over whether QDOS was a "slapdash clone" of CP/M. Which, in point of fact, it was.
A clone with a completely different file system? There were plenty of CP/M clones in those days, QDOS, later 86-DOS, later MS-DOS wasn't really a clone. It just offered a familar API set for programs porting from CP/M.
the biggest of which was using one of the worst OSs ever made. Not by today's standards, but by the standards then.
Okay, well, what would have been better then for a macine with a 16-bit processor with a 8-bit bus and 16K of memory? Microsoft originally wanted to license XENIX to IBM, but it would never work on that type of machine.
In no way did Tim Patterson rip off CP/M. It is exceedingly clear from several respecible published sources that DR shot themselves in the foot time and time again, while Microsoft delievered not only a operating system, but the programming languages for it - which was the real draw.
How soon they forget (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, for some time the IBM PC was an expensive door stop/status symbol. No wonder customers wanted the cheapest OS around!
The thing that changed everything, that sealed MS-DOS's dominance for a decade was the Lotus 123 spreadsheet. It was the killer app for MS-DOS, which made MS-DOS a must have. I was working for a company that developed CP/M software at the time, and sold systems based on an OS (TurboDOS) for S100 systems that was binary compatible with CP/M. These systems had many virtues, including running a pretty good selection (for the time) of accounting and office automation and supporting something like up to ten simultaneous users with a shared hard disk for the amazing bargain price of around $35,000e. But the question was always "does it run Lotus?" If it didn't, it was worthless.
Okay, well, what would have been better then for a macine with a 16-bit processor with a 8-bit bus and 16K of memory? Microsoft originally wanted to license XENIX to IBM, but it would never work on that type of machine.
Really? I'm not sure you've got your history right. Xenix came out in '83, which was two years after the IBM PC's debut; it was announced in '80, but it would not have been ready in time. However, 16 bit would not have been an issue, it targetted the 8086.
There were in fact Unix work alikes that targetted, believe it or not 8 bit microprocessors. I remember, for example, testing a system based on OS9 [wikipedia.org], a Unix like operating system for excellent little 6809 processor (which in todays terms is PIC level stuff). It was available in '79, and was, for the environment it was in, amazingly good, although it didn't run Lotus and therefore was "worthless". I bet I could take a modern Linux developer and set him down in front of an OS9 machine, and while it would be incredibly restrictive, he could actually do some useful work on it. Try that with DOS!
In part, I think your post goes astray in forgetting too that IBM chose to deliver an unerpowered machine in order to avoid competing with its own midrange machines.
Re:I'd be proud.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nevertheless, the original OS plan for the PC (drawn up by Bill Gates himself) was for IBM to commission DR to port CP/M to the 86. This plan fell through for obscure reasons. (Various stories about that. The one I believe is that IBM wanted airtight nondisclosure areements with DR before they'd even open negotiations, and DR balked.) Bill Gates was afraid that if he couldn't give IBM an OS, he couldn't sell them
Re:I'd be proud.... (Score:3, Informative)
In 77, as a summer student, I started working with
grad students and techs on a DEC minicomputer
(Nova). The precurser to the Eclipse (Soul of a
New Machine). This hairy monster had a whopping
8K of core memory, a paper tape reader with Basic
and Fortan compilers, and a disfunctional 1-Mbyte
hard drive (which we fixed that summer
resister pack went south). It was a very
expensive machine, but we could run scientific
routines (such as FFTs) on it as fast as the
mainframe (IBM 360) on ca
MS-DOS copied even more! (Score:4, Insightful)
So - The IBM PC used Intel CPUs that suffered from CP/M backwards compatibility (64K segments coming from the Z80 / 8085 era), and never overcame it, since even the very latest Pentium IV CPU boots up in the so-called real mode which mimicks an 8086 whose address space is segmented in 64K CP/M compliant address spaces; and MS-DOS copied the related 64K APIs. Remember the program segment prefix, i.e. the first 0x100 bytes of a
Had IBM chosen the M68000 and a better OS, many programmers wouldn't have gotten grey hair. Near pointers? Far Pointers? 5 different memory models in C or pascal? C'mon. Flat 32 bit address space, 1979. 68000 Amigas and Ataris were _way_ ahead of MS-DOS PCs at that time, but they did not manage to enter the office computer realm which made them fail economically. Today the PC market isn't office realm driven any more. How the world changes... . Anything else?
Re:All those rivers in Egypt! (Score:3, Funny)
You always love your first born more (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You always love your first born more (Score:2, Funny)
Re:You always love your first born more (Score:5, Informative)
I would be proud to have MSDOS on my resume, as would most serious software architects. MSDOS was used by millions of users, it was a true groundbreaker. MSDOS does not do much compared to VMS or VM/CMS but what it does it does on an 8/16 bit processor running at a few MHz. The original Microsoft Basic was not exactly extensive but most people would agree that it was a cool piece of coding.
But you miss the point in any case. This guy has MSDOS on his resume, what he is objecting to is the claim that he stole it.
Re:You always love your first born more (Score:3, Interesting)
If you'll remember the "pip" command from CP/M? That is straight out of RT-11, and other DEC OS's.
Re:You always love your first born more (Score:4, Informative)
And PIP was often used as proof that CP/M was a piece of garbage. Other indications being the idiotic copy command which worked the opposite way to every other one "copy to from", oh and it would erase your disk when you made the obvious mistake.
MSDOS was generally considered something of an improvement.
Re:You always love your first born more (Score:3, Informative)
My memory from the time (C.1981?) is that MS-DOS was considered a crappy low-rent OS (the alternative on the IBM PC being CPM-86 or whatever it was called) -- but cheap.
Cheap usually wins...
I remember that MS DOS 0.x was so bad that IBM rewrote it and released it as PC-DOS.
I did work on a CP/M-86 a bit later. A NEC-APC with 8" floppy disks. At that time operating systems from Digital Research were seen as being much more sophisticated. IIRC,
Should have been killed at birth (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup.
RT-11 was a program loader. RSX-11M was an operating system. It was the one you used if you couldn't get a (real) UNIX license.
Having used (real) UNIX on the 70s, RT-11, MSDOS, CP/M were all inelegant painful low-rent crap.
Kildall was iirc, a hardware engineer, and knew enough assembly to be dangerous. He simply wanted to load programs from 8" floppy drives instead of cassette tape. It was not supposed to be an operating system - never use an "OS" written by a hardware engineer.
second born-nobody cares about. (Score:3, Interesting)
You've gotta be kidding. (Score:3, Informative)
UCSD Pascal was a better designed system and ran on a 64kbyte Apple II at the whopping speed of 1MHz with a pathetic little chip called the 6502 that had three (count'em: three) one byte registers.
People were running multitasking operating system with tree-structured directory trees on hardware less powerful than what MS-DOS required before MS-DOS even appeared on the scene.
MS-DOS was
Re:You've gotta be kidding. (Score:3, Informative)
As a former 6502 programmer myself I know the limits of the machine. But it is somewhat ironic that you would point out the limitations of the 6502 to bash Bill Gates since he personaly wrote the code that made the Apple ][, the Commodore PET and most of the rest of the Micros possible, Microsoft Basic.
And whi
Re:You've gotta be kidding. (Score:3, Informative)
As a former 6502 programmer myself I know the limits of the machine. But it is somewhat ironic that you would point out the limitations of the 6502 to bash Bill Gates since he personaly wrote the code that made the Apple ][, the Commodore PET and most of the rest of the Micros possible, Microsoft Basic.
On the Apple ][ there ws no MS BASIC. There was AppleSoft Basic and INTEGER Basic. The former was written by Larry Atkinson (IIRC) and the later by Steve Wonziak.
No Mr. Gates involved at all.
angel'o'sphe
Re:You've gotta be kidding. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Apple II was developed with, and shipped with, Integer Basic. Microsoft Basic was a later addition once the machine was already well on its way.
The market rejected Pascal because it was a piece of elitist crap designed to make students 'program properly'.
Pascal was
Re:You've gotta be kidding. (Score:3, Insightful)
It was actually a good OS, all things considered (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem, of course, is the same problem we always face: it stuck around for too long. Systems advanced and it became trivial to run a more powerful OS, and thus highly desirable, but DOS stuck around since so many things were DOS based.
However don't think that it's simplicity made it bad, that was actually one of the attractive things about it. An 8086 system is really, really slow and had very little memory. It was desireable to have all the power and memory possible available to the application. You wouldn't want to try somthing like a modern Linux kernel on it. Even if you could hack it to work, it would use up all the system resources just doing it's thing, leaving nothing left for software.
TOO LATE !!! (Score:3, Interesting)
TOO LATE !!!
:
http://elks.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Some crazy people did INDEED try to run Linux on the limited original PC hardware.
We can now formulate the "laws of linux hobby projects"
1- As with any other stupid projet with "linux" in it's name (like "makinge coffee with linux"), there
Mutant offspring of QDOS (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Confused (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right - it ran stuff faster in comparison to Windows 2.x or 3.x (I'm trying not to curse here), but I don't think that anybody who remembers how necessary autoexec.bat and config
MacKiDo (Score:4, Funny)
Meanwhile, Bill is organizing an army of lawyers, and suddenly "Oh wait, they aren't talking about me!".
http://www.mackido.com/History/History_DrDos.ht
Re:MacKiDo (Score:2, Funny)
Hey, he might organize an army of knights now.
Sweet. (Score:4, Funny)
I'd be suing... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I'd be suing... (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft bilked America.
RTF film description (Score:5, Insightful)
Suing will not Bring Gary Kildall Back (Score:3, Interesting)
I have little sympathy for Tim Paterson. He stole another person's idea (i.e. CPM/86) and tried to make money off of it by selling the product (i.e. QDOS) to Bill Gates. Gates then signed an agreement with IBM to distribute a copy of MSDOS (renamed from QDOS) on each IBM PC. This agreement transformed Microsoft in
Re:Suing will not Bring Gary Kildall Back (Score:5, Informative)
Sadly, he's the exception. The entire computing business (and engineering business, and any other business involving creativity and intelligence) is replete with stories like this. Kildall is just an unusually extreme example.
Re:Suing will not Bring Gary Kildall Back (Score:5, Insightful)
Gary Kildall eventually died in a bar, but many (including myself) would say that Bill Gates drove Kildall toward suicidal drinking, which lead to him being killed in a bar with other drunks.
[...]
By contrast, Kildall did not even get the fame, i.e. the recognition that he deserved. Ask any Windows/MS-DOS user who Kildall is, and she will scratch her head with ignorance. If I were in Kildall's shoes, I would have been bitter every day of my life and would have probably committed suicide too.
I think that saying that Kildall was driven to suicide by Bill Gates is a stretch. I know of Kildall's story, but I really can't bring myself to shed too many tears. Kildall was still rich by the standards of most of us. He has successfully founded Digital Research. There were many innovative and interesting things that Kildall could have done, either at Digital Research or on his own.
You have the right to decide to kill yourself if you were "robbed" of the massive wealth and fame of Bill Gates (you make the point that it is both, not just one that is the fatal poison). In this case, I feel sorry for both you and Kildall in holding such egotistical world views.
Money may not buy happiness, but it can buy freedom. The fact that Kildall is not recognized for a crappy little operating systems like CP/M and DR-DOS is really no surprise. Looking back on CP/M, MS-DOS and DR-DOS all we can really say is "thank God we can use real operating systems like UNIX, Linux and even Windows NT/XP". Xenix and the early UNIX operating systems were far better and ran on machines not much more powerful than the Intel 286.
Instead of being famous for writing CP/M and DR-DOS Kildall could have used the money he made to do something really creative. But he did not. The tragedy in the story is that of wasted possibility, not lack of fame or an extra 40 billion dollars. The inability to take advantage of what fortune and hard work had given Kildall can be laid at Kildall's feet not Gates'.
I suspect that the real problem is that Kildall had a drinking problem and was in the wrong place at the wrong time (he died, as I recall, in a bar fight).
Re:Suing will not Bring Gary Kildall Back (Score:4, Insightful)
I suppose you also believe the old lie that Apple created the mouse driven user interface and claim MS stole from them, while ignoring where it really came from?
Give me a break. This is just more griping about why you hate the guy on top.
If more of you would stop the griping, and instead work on being on top, technology would advance 10x faster.
You were ripped off? how? did you invent 'happy o's' cerial right before 'cheerios' hit the market? 9 times out of 10, the 'ripped off' guy is a fool who gave away his idea/money when everyone else would have known better.
Which reminds me
Re:Suing will not Bring Gary Kildall Back (Score:4, Interesting)
Then again, you had Phil Katz [esva.net], who ripped off ARC from Thom Henderson, rocketed to fame and fortune with it, and then proceeded to drink himself to death. I would say that certain people can't handle failure, but certain others can't handle success either. Blaming one's individual choice to drink himself to death on another doesn't change where the responsibility for his suicide lies - with himself.
QDOS was as CP/M compatible as possible (Score:5, Informative)
It's main purpose was to be as compatible as possible to CP/M to faciliate fast porting of CP/M applications to QDOS.
Re:QDOS was as CP/M compatible as possible (Score:5, Interesting)
Right, but the guy has a point that it was in many, many ways completely unlike CP/M
... in that CP/M had many more features and was, well, just all-around better... ;-) in that way they were completely different.
All kidding aside, QDOS was meant to be simple and 'quick' disk-based OS. Nobody ( OK, few people outside the p0rn industry ) wants to call their own software 'dirty'. That sounds like a story...
Re:QDOS was as CP/M compatible as possible (Score:3, Funny)
Rimshot!
Re:DOS evolution (Score:2)
Re:DOS evolution (Score:3, Informative)
Nope. The 8088 and 8086 were identical from a software point of view. Only difference was the pinout. The 8088 fetched 16 bits as two 8-bit reads, the 8086 read a 16-bit word.
Very compatible (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:MSDOS was as CP/M compatible as possible! (Score:3, Informative)
But... (Score:4, Insightful)
...I thought it wasn't defamation if it was true.
Re:But... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But... (Score:2)
IANAL, but I'm almost entirely certain that it's only slander if you can prove that it was untrue, said with malice, and there were actual damages as a result.
Re:But... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But... (Score:3, Insightful)
Judge should throw this out of court. (Score:3, Insightful)
America has gone litigation-mad.
Defamation, historical inaccuracy and other kinds of misrepresentation can be important enough to litigate over, but this particular issue is just plain ridiculous.
"The law does not concern itself with trivialities."
The judge should just throw this out immediately and sternly warn both sides not to waste the court's time.
Re:But... (Score:2)
Al, not Vidal (Score:2, Funny)
Gore didn't make *that* quote; still talks rubbish (Score:2)
Nah; he didn't claim to have invented the internet [snopes.com] either...
Although, as I was going through that I thought "Was Gore really in politics as far back as the late 1960s"?
To which the article actually points out the answer is "no"; so Gore was still stretching things in claiming that he was responsible for fostering the environment in which the Internet was "born".
Re:Gore didn't make *that* quote; still talks rubb (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Al, not Vidal (Score:3, Informative)
Your (and my) posting on the Internet today is attributable to the role Gore played in creating the Internet when he was in the U.S. Congress.
Al Gore and the Internet [firstmonday.org]
By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize
Multics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Multics (Score:2)
Re:Multics (Score:4, Informative)
Who cares? (Score:4, Funny)
who made MSDOS,
All I know,
is I broke my toe,
kicking the damn computer out the (MS) Window,
when once again,
I'd rather have used a pen,
to write down all my precious source code.
Amen.
DNA Samples (Score:3, Funny)
Maury: "Mr. Gates, you are NOT DOS's father!" Bill: "Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I done TOLD you it ain't my baby!"
Hm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking of which, why did it take so long to come out? Was the original programmer hiding under a rock for the past decade and a half?
Re:Hm... (Score:3, Funny)
No, I Wote MS-DOS.......
No, I wrote MS-DOS, and so did my wife!
Yuck. (Score:2)
*points to Bill Gates* Your kid, not mine.
Thing should have been aborted, or at least shot when pulled mewling and bloody from the womb. World'd be better off.
Re:Yuck. (Score:4, Insightful)
reality check (Score:3, Insightful)
MS-DOS came out in 1981. At that time, people were using 4.1BSD and Smalltalk (including GUIs and IDEs). The BSD systems not only had a flexible driver architecture, they had been ported to many different systems. Some versions of them even ran on 16bit PDP-11's. This was several decades after the first multiuser operating systems were developed. Si
Device handling was in MSDOS2 (Score:4, Informative)
MSDOS 2 had huge improvements becasue at the time they wanted to merge it with Xenix and make a Unix system out of it. It had named devices and opening them as files would connect you to the device drivers. I actually implemented some of these, including what I intended to be a graphical windowing system driven by printing to stdout, it was actually quite usable and powerful.
Unfortunately that level of device support is pretty trivial. The Linux drivers you are complaining about have many more interfaces such as being able to allocate memory and mess with other parts of the kernel. If the driver was limited to read-block and write-block like the MSDOS-2 drivers were, there is no question that they would be completely independent of the kernel.
Re:And Yet (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows, by comparison, is basically a microkernel. Drivers are completely separate from and independent of the kernel.
This is a security and administration problem for GNU
They do have the same noses (Score:2, Funny)
A>
Clones (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Clones (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, here's the thing. CP/M licensees got source code. Microsoft had it. Patterson had it. Then years later IIRC, Killdall stood up in court and entered a keystrokes at a PC running MSDOS and brought up an easter egg he had programmed into CP/M years earlier, proving they had used his code.
As a result, he wound up getting lots of money and use of the MSDOS codebase to keep DR DOS compatible.
Patterson seems like the most likely source for the copying, but I've never seen that proven or any proof attempted.
QDOS was better in at least one regard (Score:3, Insightful)
Early MS-DOS didn't - well, correctly, anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and some of the directory tree-mapping programs had a REAL hard time of it, when I reset a directory pointer back on itself...
A system call ending in a "?" in both OS? (Score:3, Interesting)
no (Score:2)
Re:A system call ending in a "?" in both OS? (Score:4, Informative)
- jeps
Re:Think about what would happen... (Score:5, Insightful)
If sofware patents were available back in the day that both Microsoft and Apple were doing their thing (Apple, it's revolutionizing, and Microsoft, its copying), I dare say that neither would be around in its current form, if at all. All of the ideas we see today, in their various forms of implementation were based on something. The software patent fiasco is quite similar to the copyright fiasco - all of the fledgling companies that made it big without copyright extensions, the DMCA, or software patents, have now raised the barrier of entry to some rediculously high level. We all lose, of course.
Pain and mental anguish? (Score:3)
Paterson has endured "great pain and mental anguish" and is seeking "over $75,000" in damages, plus costs.
It looks like Paterson is trying to get economic compensation (no matter from who) for the "great pain and mental anguish" of having developed QDOS, then sell it to MS for a ridiculous sum of money and seing how they managed to create a software empire with it.
In other news... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why does this remind me of SCO? (Score:2, Funny)
paterson - has 'rights' to code, sues evans and time warner
Maybe jerry springer can do a show on frivolous lawsuits. I'd like to see the CEOs of each of the involved parties throw chairs at each other and punch each other silly.
I wonder if they'd get any brain damage. I wonder if some of them even have enough brains to get brain damage.
Then maury could do a show on CEOs that got brain damaged during a staged tv talk show.
At any event this is all (lawsuits include
Re:Why does this remind me of SCO? (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, I've used Windows from 2.0 through to 2003 and I've not seen a whole lot of improvement in the interface. (Since when is closing the application a file operation?)
One thing I loved about DOS was the ability to write TSR applets. A "Terminate, Stay Resident" program was basically a daemon tha
And they all ripped off DEC's RT-11 (Score:2, Insightful)
Paterson would also sue Wikipedia (Score:2, Interesting)
"QDOS was approximately 4,000 lines of 8086 assembly code and highly compatible with the APIs of the popular CP/M operating system"
"QDOS was developed quickly, but it lacked many features of CP/M. It was marketed as 86-DOS."
"QDOS met IBM's main criteria: It looked like CP/M, and it was easy to adapt existing 8-bit CP/M programs to run under it"
Fascinating, but Tragic (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Patterson sold his QDOS to Gates for $50,000, whereas Kildall sold his company to Novell in 1991 for $120 million, according the Oct/2004 BusinessWeek article (link:http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/conten
2) In his defamation suit, Patterson is asking for $75,000, plus court costs, per the Register piece (link:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/03/msd
3) The Register article includes a photo of Patterson's 86-DOS (QDOS) manual with the word, "Programmer", misspelled on the manual's cover.
There is a movie somewhere in there, but it's definitely not about ambition.
comments from old usenet archives (Score:5, Informative)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: filename separator change in CP/M and MS-DOS
Date: 7 Jul 1998 01:47:52 GMT
>The legend runs something like this:
> 1. The first version of MS-DOS was actually QDOS from Seattle Computer Works
There is much ongoing discussion as to whether it was ever called QDOS.
There is a general consensus that at various times it was called 86-DOS
and SCP-DOS. I belive the real name of the company whas Seattle Computer
Products.
> 2. QDOS ("Quick & Dirty OS") was an unauthorized port of CP/M to x86.
> CP/M ran on Z-80's.
There is little doubt that it was an unauthorized port. (In the US, at least)
No authorization is required to reverse engineer a product. There is much
debate about whether an of the "port" was accomplished by running a disassembly
of CP/M through Intel's 8080->8086 assembly code converter. (This would
be illegal in the US).
The typical (apocryphal) story is one of special key sequences that would
bring up a Digital Research Incorporated copyright notice in early versions
of DOS. (At this point, I've never seen a special key sequence that would
bring up such a notice in any real CP/M version.)
BTW, the CP/M version in question was written to run on the Intel 8080
chip. The ability to run it on the Z-80 was a consequence of the Z-80
design, not vice versa.
> 3a. CP/M used "/" as the separator between components in pathnames
False
> 3b. alternative version: CP/M did not have directories, so did not need or
> use any kind of slash as a pathname piece separator.
The alternative version (3b) is correct here. CP/M did not have directories
other than numbered user areas. In CP/M the '/' character is for command
switches, a trait it inherited from Digital Equipment Corp operating systems
on which it was patterned.
> 4a. QDOS and hence MS-DOS used "\" as the pathname separator to disguise
> the origin of the ripped-off software (unauthorized port from CP/M).
False, this is far too little to disguise the nearly identical APIs of
CP/M and early versions of DOS.
> 4b. alternative version: CP/M and hence QDOS and MSDOS used "/" as an
> option separator to commands, hence it was not available for use
> as pathname separator.
Correct.
Eric
What about Digital PDP 11 RT/11? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What about Digital PDP 11 RT/11? (Score:3, Interesting)
What about Linus/Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux Torvalds however, quite blatantly made Linux borrowing many ideas from the Unix systems of the time, and he's heralded as a geek hero of our time. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Linus in the least. I think he did well, and I think that Patterson did equally well creating his workalike. Kildall's arrogance cost him the IBM contract because someone else implemented a cheaper version.
well . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
poor Kildall. robbed of his proper place by amoral bags of slime, and now even the history books can't admit his contribution without being sued by said slime bags' lawyers. an object lesson about how unjust the world really is.
rip, Kildall. at least some of us remember and will stand with you on judgment day.
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