4 Mar
2005
4 Mar
'05
6:36 p.m.
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, John Allain wrote:
For people who haven't read it, here's what it
said:
"IIRC, Killdall stood up in court and entered a keystrokes at a PC
running MSDOS and brought up an easter egg he had programmed
into CP/M years earlier, proving they had used his code."
What we're trying to figure out is the keystrokes and the MSDOS version.
Here's another account: http://dfarq.homeip.net/article.php?story=935
"Back in the mid-1990s, PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak wrote
something curious about this operating system. He said he knew of an
easter egg present in CP/M in the late 1970s that caused Kildall's name
and a copyright notice to be printed. Very early versions (presumably
before the 1.0 release) of DOS had this same easter egg."
I suspect that it might be very well be a corruption of the story
about Randy Cook's easter egg in TRS-DOS, that showed up in NewDOS
prior to NEWDOS80. That one really DID exist. RS, in TRS-DOS 2.3,
changed "Randy Cook" in the easter egg to "Tandy Corp". It was
invoked by running a boot file as if it were a program, with one
of the master paswords, and pressing 'J'? and 'N'? while it was loading.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com