It is fairly well known that Randy Cook developed TRSDOS 1.*, 2.1. and
2.2 until he and Tandy had a falling out over the rights to the code.
Randy even placed an easter egg that caused his name to be printed out
in a copyright message. For TRSDOS 2.2 tandy found the code and patched
"RANDY COOK" to read "TANDY CORP" (a three byte difference).
Randy developed VTOS, and according to Tim Mann, LDOS was developed by
disassembling VTOS 4.0, fixing bugs, and building on top of that. LDOS
was eventually licensed by Tandy to be TRSDOS 6.0.
OK, the new piece, which I didn't know, was that Randy Cook was an
employee of Datapoint when he got the contract to write TRSDOS. He left
Datapoint do to consulting work, and everyone assumed he meant on
datapoint business. Apparently Datapoint claimed that Randy took DP's
code and or "technology" and used that as the basis of TRSDOS. There
was a either a lawsuit or a threat of one, but my contact says he wasn't
privy to that and so it is hearsay coming from him.
I am not familiar with the DP OS (was it really just the Databus
language, or was there an OS layer akin to TRSDOS?)
Can anybody here compare the two and find threads of similarity?