27 Oct
2006
27 Oct
'06
6:44 p.m.
Everybody who was around had hold of different pieces of that elephant.
On Fri, 27 Oct 2006, Warren Wolfe wrote:
[In the interests of avoiding problems, the
following is a composite
of several coherent and consistent stories I got from several people who
were involved. This is how I understand events to have taken place,
and, therefore, constitutes my singular opinion of events as they
occurred. No claim of ultimate accuracy should be implied or assumed.
That should keep the wolves at bay...]
It's not at ALL surprising that MSDOS resembled CP/M. The first
version of MSDOS, called simply DOS, was actually a hot copy of CP/M for
QDOS,
followed by 86-DOS and SCP-DOS
8080 that had been run through a program, XLAT, (often
called X-LAX by
those who had to clean up its output) that translated it from 8080 to
8086 mnemonics. It was produced by Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for
its combo 8080/8086 CPU board, from a commercial program of questionable
legality which "disassembled" the CP/M code running in your machine when
you ran it. (I forget the name. Anybody remember this?) It took the
crappy code (in this case code generated by the PL/M compiler, and made
commented assembly language source.
The folks at Seattle Computer Products got this disassembler, ran
it, took the output of that, and ran it into XLAT, and voila! CP/M for
the 8086. It was changed so that one could take the various
three-letter CP/M commands, and spell them out, and they would work.
Also, in an apparent attempt to avoid being sued by Digital Research,
they kept "ERASE" as an expanded command, but it only worked, in
abbreviated form, as "DEL".
Tim Patterson never denied that QDOS ("Quick and Dirty OS") was based
closely on CP/M. Most structures were deliberately kept compatible.
However, he liked the idea of a linked list of blocks, as used at that
time in the Microsoft "Stand-Alone BASIC" used on some NEC machines, and
quite similar to the OS MS wrote for the RS Coco.
Apparently that was sufficient, as nobody
got sued. Bill Gates then bought out SCP -- I'm unclear if it was the
whole company or just the O/S product, and a legend was born.
just the OS.
and both Tim Patterson ("Falcon Tech"?) and SCP retained rights to use and
market the OS!
Much later (1987?) when SCP was on the rocks, a number of biggies,
reputedly including AT&T were very interested in the asset of a royalty
free license. MS sued, but then they settled out of court by MS buying
SCP. (MUCH cheaper than the lawsuit would have been!)
They went
to work, and started cleaning up their copy, and DOS for PC was born.
And, if not for a significant error by Gary Kildall, creator of CP/M, it
might well have been Digital Research Inc, in the place of MicroSoft.
What a different world we would live in, eh?
If not for the SPECIFIC incident, (Gary flying up to Oakland for the day
when IBM was scheduled to meet), DRI (once "Intergalctic Digital
Research"!) would still have lost it - there was an extreme level of
culture clash. IBM, with their dress code, etc.) was SHOCKED at what they
saw in Pacific Grove. And (UNCOFIRMED), when the staff at DRI first saw
the IBM people arriving, they thought it was a drug raid.
After his death, friends of Gary claimed that the flight to Oakland was
essential and necessary! (Nobody else in the company could have handled
delivering some manuals to Godbout at the Oakland airport.)
It would, indeed, have been a different world!
Although the PC 5150 was released with MS-DOS (8/1981), IBM agreed to also
sell CP/M-86, as a concession to DRI's objections to copyright violations.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
PO Box 1236 (510) 558-9366
Berkeley, CA 94701-1236