So what?
EETimes.com – Court ruling supports claims that Microsoft’s first OS was stolen — I didn’t even know this lawsuit was going on. I discuss the folklore of this story on today’s Tech5 podcast here. Look for the episode titled: Who Wrote DOS
Dismissing a defamation suit brought by the inventor of DOS against a British writer, a judge has left unchallenged computer industry lore that holds the operating system Microsoft licensed to IBM in the 1980s — thereby launching Bill Gates’ multibillion dollar software empire — was a knock off.
In a book on American innovation, author Sir Harold Evans wrote that DOS inventor Tim Paterson relied heavily on an existing OS called CP/M (Control Program/Monitor) created by a programmer who has since died. Microsoft in 1980 struck a licensing deal with Paterson’s company — Seattle Computer Products — to obtain access to DOS and resell it to IBM.
bah this is **OLD** news, ive known about this for years
back in the 17th century, if you plagerized somone’s work it was considered a compliment to them – jebus, what 400 years can do
I always thought CP/M stood for Control Program/Microcomputer. I learn something new every day on DU. Also, if you knew CP/M, you already knew DOS except for little confusing things like copy from – to instead of copy to – from.
#12 – LOL!
What? DOS is ripped off from CP/M? Who would have guessed?
I was always under the impression that:
Unix | CPM | DOS
#12, Dauragon
Great one.
Alot of you are aware that PBS did a documentary detailing much of this is in a program called “Triumph of the Nerds”.
The main page also includes a link to the transcript of the program:
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/
Much of this early DOS info (QDOS, PC-DOS 1.0) can be found in part two of the transcript:
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
Patterson essentially admits to hacking CP/M as a personal project. MS was aware that this was a hacked version of CP/M at the time of purchase.
$50k for QDOS was a big win for Seattle Computer Products.
In 1981 $50k hard cash was a windfall profit for any engineering firm.
SCP was selling computer boards, not even entire computers. They needed an 8086 OS in order to sell their 8086 boards. So SCP was looking at “giving away” the OS with every computer board.
$50k was probably more profit than they would make with the entire company in two years.
What is wrong with a “Copied CP/M”? Go back a few years and learn that CP/M is actually based on a Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) operating system. (TOPS-10) which used programs like PIP and a similar file naming system. (MS hired DEC’s VAX-VMS author, Dave Cutler, to lead the first version of Windows NT.) Microsoft renamed commands like “PIP” to “COPY” and did the world a big favor.
Oh yeah, I read somewhere that IBM sold around 35k PCs in 1981-1982. Microsoft didnt exactly make back much of their MSDOS costs. Not until Mitch Kapor started shipping 1-2-3 for the IBM….. then the real fun started…