Bob Axtell <PICLIST@mitvma.mit.edu> wrote:

> A small gang of programmers disassembled Digital Research's CPM,
> tinkered with it a little, then came up with IBM DOS 1.0.

    Um, no.  Tim Paterson wrote an 8086 DOS called QDOS (for "Quick
    and Dirty DOS"), distributed it briefly through the company he
    worked for (Seattle Computer), then sold it to Microsoft and went
    to work for them.  While there, he modified it to meet IBM's
    requirements for PC-DOS, and that's when it started to really
    look like CP/M.

    The notion that Paterson disassembled CP/M and "tinkered with it
    a little" to make QDOS is absurd; QDOS was written before the
    first IBM PC was built, and CP/M-86 wasn't available (as I
    recall) until after the PC-AT shipped.  In my opinion, the
    resemblance between PC-DOS and CP/M is really only due to a)
    IBM's desire for PC-DOS to have a familiar interface, and b) the
    fact that any OS that fit in 16K of RAM was probably going to
    look a lot like every other 16K OS, anyway.

> Now, in all fairness, once the lawsuit was enetered, MS$ finally
> began fixing the core, and Win2K and WinXP work pretty well.

    In all fairness, it wasn't the antitrust lawsuit that made Win2K
    and WinXP so good; it's the fact that they're built on WinNT,
    which was written by a team led by Dave Cutler, the architect of
    DEC's VMS operating system.

    If you want to accuse Microsoft of inappropriately using someone
    else's code, you could make a better case for it with WinNT than
    with PC-DOS 1.0.  Ever wonder why Windows NT supported the
    obscure DEC Alpha microprocessor as well as the Intel x86?
    Microsoft agreed to support the Alpha in return for DEC's
    agreeing not to sue over the Windows NT source code, much of
    which was, allegedly, a verbatim copy of DEC's VMS source.

    -Andy

=== Andrew Warren -- aiw@cypress.com
=== Principal Design Engineer
=== Cypress Semiconductor Corporation
===
=== Opinions expressed above do not
=== necessarily represent those of
=== Cypress Semiconductor Corporation

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