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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

#61

Post by groovy2shoes »

_0ffh wrote: post #12
dspillett wrote: post #2

> 22 system calls ... that had the same function (and function number) as the CP/M code. That probably shows evidence of reverse engineering, not code copying, similar to the clean-room reimplementation of IBM's BIOS chips by Compaq. > the types of actions that send/receive text from a printer, phone, hard disk, etc. I know they are giving examples for a modern audience, but I was amused by the inclusion of phones in…

No reverse engineering necessary. Those CP/M system calls were all documented, and it never was a secret that QDOS was heavily modelled after CP/M.

> it never was a secret that QDOS was heavily modelled after CP/M.

Indeed. In fact, when IBM first built the PC, they'd tried to reach a deal with Digital Research to get an official version of CP/M as the PC's flagship OS. The deal fell through for some reason I can't recall at the moment, so IBM went to MicroSoft and explicitly asked for a CP/M work-alike and a BASIC interpreter (which was considered MS's forte back then). This was really a no-brainer, given how supremely popular CP/M and BASIC were on microcomputers at the time.

After Digital Research heard about the QDOS/PC-DOS deal, they threatened to sue IBM, alleging even then that it infringed their intellectual property. But they gave IBM an option: also sell CPM/86 alongside PC-DOS, and IBM gladly obliged. Problem was: PC-DOS cost something like $50 whereas CPM/86 cost something like $250, and consumers voted with their wallets.

(I recently read somewhere that IBM didn't tell DRI about their planned price tag for PC-DOS, and Gary Kildall was right-miffed about the situation).

Besides those two, UCSD Pascal was also available to run on the bare metal of PC, essentially as an OS. I've never used it myself, so I don't know what its OS-y features were like, or if it had any at all.

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

#62

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

dorkalorka wrote: post #58
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hoping this doesn't turn the thread into a male/female thing... Assuming that your question is meant in good faith, here's an example. I have two sons. One is extremely emotional, far more so than his brother was at that age. He cries over minor incidents, take small slights to heart, gets upset easily, etc. His teacher describes him as "feeling things very deeply." However, he is also extremely bright and very stron…

You just showed that the words "weak" and "emotional" mean two different things. No one ever questioned that.

The assumption in the post I replied to was that being emotional was seen essentially as being weak.

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

#63

Post by dorkalorka »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #62
dorkalorka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just showed that the words "weak" and "emotional" mean two different things. No one ever questioned that.

The assumption in the post I replied to was that being emotional was seen essentially as being weak.

No it wasn't. The question was whether one was more neutral than the other.

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

#64

Post by unsignedqword »

jackhack wrote: post #41
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…

>excellent programmer ... top of his game One of these two assertions may not be true. GORILLAS.BAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game) DONKEY.BAS https://blog.codinghorror.com/bill-gates-and-donkey-bas/ Q.E.D.

If IBM asked asked you to make a few short demos of BASIC to bundle along with your interpreter as an example of what it could do, what would you have done?

Keep in mind that this is BASIC, and, as a result, is mostly targeted at people with little to no programming experience. Ideally, someone would be able to open the script up and probably learn something from it.

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

#65

Post by dorkalorka »

lucozade wrote: post #52
dorkalorka wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"like a little girl" Why not like a little boy? Because Joel thinks women are weaker then men, obviously.

> Because Joel thinks women are weaker then men, obviously. Well no or, maybe he does, but you can't infer that from this. What he is referring to is the tendency of little girls to like, OMG, get super excited and make squeally noises. As a parent of both sexes and having refereed birthday parties for both I can safely say that his analogy was fair and wouldn't have worked if he had said "little boy". Of course, if…

Ah. You've just settled the whole nature-vs-nurture debate for us with your anecdote. Thanks! The world owes you a debt.

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

#67

Post by dragonwriter »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #62
dorkalorka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just showed that the words "weak" and "emotional" mean two different things. No one ever questioned that.

The assumption in the post I replied to was that being emotional was seen essentially as being weak.

No, the question was in what way one was more neutral than the other.

I mean, the whole post (excluding quoted material used to show what that post was responding to) was (including the incorrect use of a period where a question mark was intended):

How is the idea that women are "more emotional" than men "more neutral" than the idea that "women are weaker than men".

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

#69

Post by sctb »

dorkalorka wrote: post #63
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption in the post I replied to was that being emotional was seen essentially as being weak.

No it wasn't. The question was whether one was more neutral than the other.

Let's please not take this thread farther afield than it already is.

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

#70

Post by groovy2shoes »

rbanffy wrote: post #57
phire wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 batt…

Possibly, but I would assume that he was referring to fairly unique features of CP/M, code that was never released under a free license, that were mimicked by QDOS in order to make it easier to port software to it, or, maybe, because they were a genuinely useful idea. At that time, the separation of of portable and non portable parts of an OS (CP/M ran on very different and fairly incompatible machines) was quite rem…

> At that time, the separation of of portable and non portable parts of an OS (CP/M ran on very different and fairly incompatible machines) was quite remarkable

On microcomputers, perhaps, but not on computers in general. Unix is a well-known example of an OS that did this, with the hardware-dependent parts mostly confined to a small amount of assembly language and much of the C source platform-independent. This was the state of Unix by around 1973 or so. And that was near the dawn of minicomputers.

Even before Unix and minicomputers, it was starting to become common on mainframe computers as manufacturers started releasing revised and novel models (and dealing with the porting efforts). Notably, the Burroughs B5000 didn't have an assembly language at all, and system software (the Master Control Program, an awesome name that (perhaps unfortunately) lost the jargon skirmish with "Operating System") was written primarily in a dialect of Algol-60. The MCP went on to run on successor systems starting with the B6500 with only a small number of changes to support the new architecture, and Unisys's offerings to this day still run a continuously updated version of that original MCP -- first released in 1961.

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