Who invented DOS?

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, John Allain wrote: Ahh... that does reveal a bit. I, and I'm sure many, translated programs from 8080/z80 to 8086 with a text editor 'search and replace'. Clearly this was Intel's intent and it worked fine; the first thing I translated was my EPROM debugger/boot code. (It obviously required hand coding too to make it work but the bulk of hard-won code was ported.) So if you disassembled 8080 binary, mechanically translated the resulting source to 8086, that would preserve the easter egg. (Man would that be one ugly program.) It seems entirely likely that Kildall's hack (algorithmically obscured text within the code somewhere) would only be preserved by some sort of mechanical translation. It's doubtful an honest re-write even with listings side by side would result in it being preserved. There are few enough CP/M binaries that the sources of which could contain such things. CCP did not become COMMAND.COM, that is clear, it's totally different. MSDOS/CPM kept the same "BDOS::BIOS" relationship, jumptables and all, but MSDOS (and 86DOS) have a totally different filesystem, so the directory and block-management stuff is unlikely to contain the egg. I bet some puzzling would work out a list of the few places where text would be brought to console out (the implication of the accounts above). If this were the case, I bet I (and many others) could identify mechanically translated code by looking at it but (1) I'm rusty and (2) I don't really give a shit, I'll wait to enjoy someone else's work. Gotta be 86DOS or MSDOS 1.25. The first 86DOS I wrote a BIOS for was version (oh so clever) 0.86. It was basically 8086 CPM 1.4. Then there was a 1.10 I think.