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There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source

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Re: There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source

#31

Post by gwbas1c »

Far too many people underestimate Bill Gates' technical skills. He was an excellent programmer; and in the early 80s, at the top of his game.

Outside of the Bill Gates is evil bubble, he's regarded as a technical genius and a business genius; which is why he was able to trounce his competition. (Basically, he wrote better code and ran better businesses.)

All of the late 1970s and early 1980s personal computers ran Bill Gates' basic. Basic was their operating system.

Why would someone like this need to copy someone else's OS? He didn't, because he was mart enough to write his own OS, and had the experience to do so. The function number thing is no different then Android copying Java's API.

Re: There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source

#32

Post by phire »

rbanffy wrote: post #30
phire wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kildall never explicitly claimed that MSDOS copied CP/M's code. There are just repeated claims that "MSDOS infringed on CP/M's copyrights" and based on all reverse engineering efforts and the lack of an actual lawsuit, we can safely assume Kindall is not using a legally valid definition of "copyrights".

It's "Kildall". And he hasn't been doing anything for quite some time. He died in the 90's.

Thanks, I fixed the spelling.

Though it doesn't really matter what he has been doing recently, my point is that there was no lawsuit back in the '80s when he was alive, so we can safely assume he had no proof of actual infringement.

Furthermore, we can infer that what Kildall claimed was "Infringements of CP/M's copyrights" was something more along the lines of what google and oracle are now having massive legal battles over.

Re: There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source

#33

Post by JoeAltmaier »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #29
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on an OS that did it differently. On the 8086, addresses were constructed by adding the segment and offset (shifted by 4 bits). SO there were 4096 combinations that resolved to the same location. We used those combinations to call into the OS app entry point. The particular combination indicated which function. The stack used the normal calling convention. So no icky trap entry points to code around - just c…

That's pretty ingenious. Can you share any other details about the OS?

It was called, unimaginatively, 'CTOS' for "Convergent Technologies OS". When the 286 came along the original syscall trick quit working, so we invented another one. We simply used an invalid segment and trapped; the offset became the function number. Otherwise it worked identically.

CTOS was message-passing. All system calls were for timers, memory or message manipulation. The messages were a tiny header including a 'request code', some scalar arguments and a set of buffers. OpenFile, Read, everything. On the top of the OS were Services that received messages. There was an OS message dispatch mechanism where Services registered for particular message codes. So the client Sending a message didn't know where their message would end up. The original feature that made money was the 'diskless workstation'. The file system codes were dispatched to Client Agent that simply packaged them up and sent them to a designated Server. Brought down the client workstation cost dramatically.

Re: There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source

#34

Post by ThinkBeat »

gwbas1c wrote: post #31

Far too many people underestimate Bill Gates' technical skills. He was an excellent programmer; and in the early 80s, at the top of his game. Outside of the Bill Gates is evil bubble, he's regarded as a technical genius and a business genius; which is why he was able to trounce his competition. (Basically, he wrote better code and ran better businesses.) All of the late 1970s and early 1980s personal computers ran Bi…

You are aware that Bill did not develop ms-dos right?

They bought QDOS (Quick and Dirty OS): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS

Re: There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source

#35

Post by phire »

gwbas1c wrote: post #31

Far too many people underestimate Bill Gates' technical skills. He was an excellent programmer; and in the early 80s, at the top of his game. Outside of the Bill Gates is evil bubble, he's regarded as a technical genius and a business genius; which is why he was able to trounce his competition. (Basically, he wrote better code and ran better businesses.) All of the late 1970s and early 1980s personal computers ran Bi…

It's not really taught these days, but writing simple Disk Operating Systems isn't that hard. Any decent programmer could do it.

And Dos 1.x's feature set was so small that a single programmer should be able to reproduce the it set in well under a year of full-time work. IBM's BIOS did most of the heavy lifting anyway.

Re: There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source

#36

Post by EvanAnderson »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #33
EvanAnderson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty ingenious. Can you share any other details about the OS?

It was called, unimaginatively, 'CTOS' for "Convergent Technologies OS". When the 286 came along the original syscall trick quit working, so we invented another one. We simply used an invalid segment and trapped; the offset became the function number. Otherwise it worked identically. CTOS was message-passing. All system calls were for timers, memory or message manipulation. The messages were a tiny header including a…

Very interesting! I worked around a number of CTOS-based machines in a Unisys-based financial environment in the late 90s. I was responsible for the "PC" portion of the network. The CTOS-systems all fell on the "Unisys-side", where we plebeian non-Unisys vendors weren't permitted to work! I was always interested in the CTOS machines but never got a chance to mess around with any of them. Sounds like it might have been a lot of fun.

Re: There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source

#37

Post by 2close4comfort »

unsignedqword wrote: post #26
2close4comfort wrote: post #15

Yeah well I think it has been proven that Gates was more style than substance and some of the choices he made early in the DOS wars were at the expense of others like Kildall. He was able to take a something that was not technically superior (copied or not) and beat his competition (DOS 6.22 anyone?). So yes he is a "good" capitalist but his 31337 skills are sh!t, he was never a tech genius.

"So yes he is a "good" capitalist but his 31337 skills are sh!t, he was never a tech genius." As Microsoft grew larger, his role became much more associated with managing the company at large than with technical mumbo jumbo, but Gates was more technically competent than you think. He co-developed Altair BASIC and (supposedly) FAT, and was well versed in some more CS-heavy stuff, also: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu…

I even question the BASIC stuff and FAT maybe but I think not, at that point he was more interested in being rich than making something functional. His "contributions" were to take things that people in educational computing had been using and contributing to for the betterment of everyone and package that and sell it to IBM. I think there is more borrowed in DOS than just the Kildall contributions, but it has been whitewashed and forgotten.

Re: There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source

#38

Post by mark-r »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #34
gwbas1c wrote: post #31

Far too many people underestimate Bill Gates' technical skills. He was an excellent programmer; and in the early 80s, at the top of his game. Outside of the Bill Gates is evil bubble, he's regarded as a technical genius and a business genius; which is why he was able to trounce his competition. (Basically, he wrote better code and ran better businesses.) All of the late 1970s and early 1980s personal computers ran Bi…

You are aware that Bill did not develop ms-dos right? They bought QDOS (Quick and Dirty OS): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS

That just proves his brilliance in the business sense. He was certainly capable of writing MS-DOS himself, but realized he didn't have to and that there was an opportunity in front of him. He certainly exploited it.

Re: There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source

#39

Post by JoeAltmaier »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #36
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was called, unimaginatively, 'CTOS' for "Convergent Technologies OS". When the 286 came along the original syscall trick quit working, so we invented another one. We simply used an invalid segment and trapped; the offset became the function number. Otherwise it worked identically. CTOS was message-passing. All system calls were for timers, memory or message manipulation. The messages were a tiny header including a…

Very interesting! I worked around a number of CTOS-based machines in a Unisys-based financial environment in the late 90s. I was responsible for the "PC" portion of the network. The CTOS-systems all fell on the "Unisys-side", where we plebeian non-Unisys vendors weren't permitted to work! I was always interested in the CTOS machines but never got a chance to mess around with any of them. Sounds like it might have bee…

Yeah, Unisys bought Convergent. The Financial environment was strong. Also government and military. Anybody who used total-cost-of-ownership as a metric found CTOS to be attractive. The network was self-configuring so you saved a network admin right off the top.

Re: There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source

#40

Post by ninkendo »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #34
gwbas1c wrote: post #31

Far too many people underestimate Bill Gates' technical skills. He was an excellent programmer; and in the early 80s, at the top of his game. Outside of the Bill Gates is evil bubble, he's regarded as a technical genius and a business genius; which is why he was able to trounce his competition. (Basically, he wrote better code and ran better businesses.) All of the late 1970s and early 1980s personal computers ran Bi…

You are aware that Bill did not develop ms-dos right? They bought QDOS (Quick and Dirty OS): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS

Yeah, that's kind of the important point. It's not whether BillG or any of his engineers would have needed to rip off CP/M, it's whether the dude they bought it from did.
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