Actually, Tim Paterson wrote QDOS to be a CP/M clone. The idea was to create
a more or less instant software base by giving Aston-Tate, Wordstar, etc. an
8080-to-8086 translator and an 8086 assembler. Presto! All of the CP/M
titles now available for the new 8086 platforms just starting to show up.

In fact, although Mr. Gates denied MS-DOS' heritage from CP/M, MS-DOS
continued to support the "call 0x0005" entry point well into the v3.x's.

The big thing that Microsoft did to QDOS was to make the "user areas" under
CP/M behave more like subdirectories under UNIX. But that change didn't
happen until v2.0.

Douglas Wood
Software Engineer
dbwood@kc.rr.com
ICQ#: 143841506

Home of the EPICIS Development System for the PIC
http://epicis.piclist.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Warren" <aiw@CYPRESS.COM>
To: <PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 2:51 PM
Subject: Re: [OT]: Why MS$ Is Hated


> 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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