Microsoft Paternity Case Settled 130
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."
Thrown Out (Score:5, Interesting)
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yeah, except for the stupid backslashes, which are very un-Unix and un-C.
Re:Thrown Out (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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CP/M could have hard drives (Score:2)
The catch was that CP/M (including the first couple of renditions of CP/M-86 had no notion of directories. It did, however, have 16 (?) numbered "users", which could mask the available files. ISTR that default was user 0 which could see everything, and that the other users were accesse
Oh, and . . . (Score:2)
hawk
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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.
Ripped off the user interface - WTF are you talking about??
Copying an oldfile to newfile in CP/M: A> PIP newfile oldfile (may be missing some characters)
Copying an oldfile to newfile in 86-DOS: A: COPY oldfile newfile
The 86-DOS command for deleting a file was ERASE
86-DOS used BATch files, CP/M used SUBmit files
The API for QDOS/86-DOS was by design a close copy of CP/M's API, specifically to allow for translation of CP/M code to 86-DOS code. The concept of File Control Blocks were brought in fo
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Personally, I think the whole idea of "intellectual property" is absurd from the start. Owning an idea? Ridiculous. It is my humble prediction that so called "intellectual property" will one day be the downfall of capitalism as we know it. Or rather, it will make capitalism obsolete.
-matthew
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Re:Thrown Out (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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I still have some. Circuit Cellar was great. Chaos Manor.
Yeah, my beard is a bit off color nowadays too.
qz
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OK, I pick up some light hairs my wife leaves on the pillow, but . . . really, they're not mine . . .
hawk
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possibly Radio Electronics.
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It seems to me that QDOS changed names - what I was running on my S100 system started out as QDOS and then changed names to SCP-DOS and was from Seattle Computer Products who were basically just across the street from Microsoft in Bellevue. The story I heard at the time from someone at SCP was that Microsoft hired the services of the SCP guy who did their DOS and the result was PC-DOS.
Either way SCP-DOS was clearly CPM rewritten for the 8086 - as another poster mentioned even the file control blocks were
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The speed of the SCP (processor and 8" floppy) was impressive compared to the original IBM PC.
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Gramps losing his wife isn't all that uncommon...
Article bias (Score:1, Insightful)
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Re:Article bias (Score:5, Funny)
And judging by your regular postings you feel quite at home here
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Markets, not quality, decide predominance (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's not exactly superior engineering is it?
Re:Markets, not quality, decide predominance (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Everything has its warts. On the technical excellence scale I'd certainly rate Linux before Mac OSX and Windows though.
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If it's the latter, what is technically superior about Linux and the Linux environment? The package management? The broad range of binary distributed packages that are distro specific? The ease of package compilation? The consistency in the look and feel of GUI programs? The consistency of the GUIs (ie; window managers)? The consistency of the libraries? The consistency of applications' use of l
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All of the above. Although the definition has been muddied in recent times the kernel IS the OS. However, you can't really have a fair comparison with the other popular operating systems because they are distributions. So yes, the discussion must include everything that is available for Linux as a platform and that everything is not limited to a single distribution. We can discuss features unt
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Err.. better font rendering? (Both Fedora/RHEL and openSUSE/SLED. Mandriva also, but have not seen much of it recently). The different distributions are experimenting with their user interface, which is good (Fedora with the GNOME Online Desktop, SUSE with SLAB (GNOME) and their custom KDE menu, Mandriva with their 3-D Matisse desktop). You don't want to replace Microsoft's monopo
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Maybe to someone's eyes. Linux fonts have looked great to me for a couple years now on any major distribution. They all use anti-aliased fonts. Fonts only matter to the extent that you don't notice them.
'The different distributions are experimenting with their user interface, which is good (Fedora with the GNOME Online Desktop, SUSE with SLAB (GNOME) and their custom KDE menu, Mandriva with their 3-D Matisse desktop).'
Yes, but they suck.
'You don't want to replace Microsoft's mo
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Not just software (Score:2)
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Just out of curiosity, how many spreadsheets and word processors were available for the Amiga? How about, let's see back then, Word Perfect or Lotus 123?
Yeah, it would be nice in a perfect world, where technical excellence equated to market penetration, but then again, who will be the judge of technical excellence?
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Re:Markets, not quality, decide predominance (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
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And its better to be rich with connections than either. Most small companies that have no track record and haven't produced anything couldn't even get a meeting to pitch their product to IBM in the first place.
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I saw a documentary on the biography channel about Bill Gates, and it was amazing how plugged in his mother was. From Mary Maxwell Gates [wikipedia.org]:
She was the first female president of King Countys United Way, the first woman to chair the national United Ways executive committee where she served most notably with IBM's CEO, John Akers, and the first woman on the First Interstate Bank of Washington's board of directors.
The saying "It's not what you know, but who you know." seems to be quite appropriate in this case.
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What we're discussing right now is whether BG3 had an unfair advantage over any other small company when he landed the famous IBM consulting contract. Starting the company with Dad's checkbook is not that big an advantage.
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Mary Maxwell Gates (July 5, 1929-June 9, 1994) served 18 years (1975-1993) on the University of Washington board of regents. She was the first female president of King County's United Way, the first woman to chair the national United Way's executive committee where she served most notably with IBM's CEO, John Akers, and the first woman on the First Interstate Bank of Washington's board of directors. Mary's son Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates [wikipedia.org] Emphasis mine.
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Most small companies that have no track record and haven't produced anything couldn't even get a meeting to pitch their product to IBM in the first place
I hope you're not talking about Microsoft here. They had produced a very popular version of BASIC before IBM approached them. IBM originally talked to them to license Microsoft BASIC, since a BASIC interpreter was seen as something any microcomputer needed. When they couldn't get the OS they wanted, they got Microsoft to provide one as well.
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Don't rewrite history. Microsoft in 1980 was a known quantity, dominant in programming languages for the eight-bit micro, and had the licensed XENIX OS ready for the sixteen-bit micro. Microsoft Timeline [thocp.net]
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IBM had a launch date set for the PC.
The clock was running out for Kildall. He hadn't nailed down the deal or pushed his OS to completion.
Gates was there waiting and Gates took a chance, promising to deliver something serviceable on a very tight schedule and at a very attractive price - without licensing it exclusively to IBM.
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For any significant real-world problem there are at least 2 things that need to be solved. Call it "the
if computers were mouse trap .. (Score:2)
No, you license a mouse trap to a company whilst not actually owning one, then go out and buy one from a third company and get the first company to pay for it. Later on you license the same mouse trap to other companies as first company neglected to get an exclusive deal. Later on first company tries and fails to wriggle out through the invention of their own mOuSse2. YOU take the money and spend it on MouseNT trap instead. Fool m
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> what lives and what ends up with the Amiga and other good ideas in the storeroom of history.
In terms of specific products, product lines, and companies, that's true.
However, it's not entirely true when it comes to ideas, capabilities, and interface design, because in the case of these things a lot (albeit not all) of the better ones get copied from product to product and from one company's product
Credit where none should be assigned. (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, No One Admits To Singing, Writing, Producing Nation's No. 1 Song [theonion.com].
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Yup. No driver real model, passes everything important off to the BIOS (and ignores everything important that it can't), can't multitask on its own, a memory limitation that seems very obvious in retrospect, no sensible pipes, and a file system that's constantly losing track of its own mind. But apparently, someone wants credit for it.
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"DO NOT WANT!"
- Tux
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Microsoft on Maury Povich (Score:1)
*Bill runs backstage crying*
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It could even be considered true that the software industry imposed a hardware standard (and, later, an OS one) and thus killed the hardware industry.
I really wish my notebook had an Alpha or MIPS processor...
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Someone Call Maury... (Score:1)
Great pain and mental anguish (Score:2, Insightful)
Meh. 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? They have degraded and degenerated the concept of "justice" to the point I can no longer spe
Re:Great pain and mental anguish (Score:5, Funny)
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".
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They might not have "von" or "de" or other aristocratic parts in their name, but they are aristocrats for all that matters. Remember the duck test: When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.
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Thanks for bringing this up. Let's see if you can spot the difference between the old robber barons, and the new crop of American Aristocrats:
Or do you mean their modern equivalent -- the Bush family estate, Kennedies, the persons who control Haliburton?
The difference is heredity. Strong estate taxes kept the first set from passing their money down, like the second set does. Th
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For once, money was never a defining trait of aristocracy (as any Jane Austen book will tell, and she reports quite succinctly about the heredity problems of UK aristocrats, too), but influence, political power, and being the upper class in society.
Second, from somebody with your nick name I would have expected that you know that the fall of the Vanderbilt empires (and others of that tim
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None of which can be maintained without adequate resources. If the next generation always has to start from scratch- with nothing- regardless of influence, political power, and class they will be facing an uphill climb. Nobody with influence wants to talk to
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But if the person is hardly beaten, then it's hardly any punishment then is it? Now, severely beaten, on the other hand...
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And Justice for All [sing365.com]
God, I feel old when I realise I just waxed nostalgic about
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Come on, mods.
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You might also want to take note that while Paterson *filed* a suit (and I fully agree with you that
Settlement details (Score:2, Funny)
Drama (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a fan of Gary Kildall's, but was the last part of that statement even necessary?
Why interject commentary in an otherwise fairly objective and good article?
I do not think it means what you think it means (Score:4, Funny)
But that would defameation, not defamation.
Although since we are talking about DOS, perhaps deinfameation would have been more accurate.
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Patterson and others borrowed from CP/M bigtime (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
RT-11: CP/M, done right. (Score:1)
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phunctor
Tim Paterson already had his payday for QDOS (Score:1, Funny)
names taken fro UNIX too (Score:2)
ooh, wrong paternity case (Score:1)
free money
MS-DOS Encylopedia -1986 (Score:3, Informative)
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Only after 'Gates obtained the source code [nlc-bnc.ca] for a version of Basic from DECUS, a DEC user's group'
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Bill G on ACID [reelsplatter.com] &-)