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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (688631)	12/16/2012 7:45:14 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576003

The bigger dumbass was the guy that sold Gates the operating system, a CP/M clone, the code he used. Gates didn't write it, he just changed the name and tweaked it. en.wikipedia.org " Creation of PC DOSMicrosoft purchased a nonexclusive license for 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products in December 1980 for $25,000. In May 1981, it hired Tim Paterson to port the system to the IBM PC, which used the slower and less expensive Intel 8088 processor and had its own specific family of peripherals. IBM watched the developments daily, submitted over 300 change requestsbefore it accepted the product and wrote the user manual for it. In July 1981, a month before the PC's release, Microsoft purchased all rights to 86-DOS from SCP for $50,000. It met IBM's main criteria: it looked like CP/M, and it was easy to adapt existing 8-bit CP/M programs to run under it, notably thanks to the TRANS command which would translate source files from 8080 to 8086 machine instructions. Microsoft licensed 86-DOS to IBM, and it became PC DOS 1.0. This license also permitted Microsoft to sell DOS to other companies, which it did. The deal was spectacularly successful, and SCP later claimed in court that Microsoft had concealed its relationship with IBM in order to purchase the operating system cheaply. SCP ultimately received a 1 million dollar settlement payment. [ edit]Intellectual property disputeWhen Digital Research founder Gary Kildall examined PC DOS and found that it duplicated CP/M's programming interface, he wanted to sue IBM, which at the time claimed that PC DOS was its own product. However, Digital Research's attorney did not believe that the relevant law was clear enough to sue. Nonetheless, Kildall confronted IBM and persuaded them to offer CP/M-86 with the PC in exchange for a release of liability. Controversy has continued to surround the similarity between the two systems. Perhaps the most sensational claim comes from Jerry Pournelle, who claims that Kildall personally demonstrated to him that DOS contained CP/M code by entering a command in DOS that displayed Kildall's name; [2] as of 2006 Pournelle has not revealed the command and nobody has come forward to corroborate his story. A 2004 book about Kildall says that he used such an encrypted message to demonstrate that other manufacturers had copied CP/M, but does not say that he found the message in DOS; [3] instead Kildall's memoir (a source for the book) pointed to the well-known interface similarity. Paterson insists that the 86-DOS software was his original work, and has denied referring to or otherwise using CP/M code while writing it. [4] After the 2004 book appeared, he sued the authors and publishers for defamation. [5] The court ruled in summary judgement that no defamation had occurred, as the book's claims were opinions based on research or were not provably false. [6]"