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Do you think Tim Patterson infringed on DRI's rights with QDOS/MSDOS?

Pentad4k said:
Those of you who used CP/M and then used MS-DOS, I wondered what your opinion on this was? From the books I've read and the interviews I've seen with Tim, I do not think that he copied any CP/M code into QDos. However, Gary Kildall threatened IBM with a lawsuit because QDOS was so close CP/M which forced IBM to also offer CP/M. It is interesting that Gary was unhappy with QDOS, but DRI copied Apple with GEM in 1984.

In Merrill Chapman's book "In Search of Stupidity" he says people begged Gary to lower the price of CP/M for the 5150, but Gary declined.
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I have no idea how correct the author is, but a lot more detail of the similarities in BIOS calls etc. is here: https://www.embedded.com/was-dos-copied-from-cp-m/

My take is that Gates was better connected (his mother and the IBM Chairman John Opel knew each other socially via United Way) and was legally a lot "sharper" and he was aggressive in his dealings with people. Given what I know now of large bureaucratic companies (I work for a large telecom), Opel's influence even as a sugggestino, would have far, far outweighed any discussions of technical merit.

Kildall, once you understand more of his background, was very obviously the better technologist. We would have had REAL multitasking on x86 hardware, literally decades earlier, with Kildall.
 
There were other x80 work-alikes for CP/M, such as TP/M for the QX-10. If one were to make a case for infringement, that would be one to start with. However, since the target architecture between Q-DOS and CP/M was different, I think an infringement case is a nonstarter.
If you want a good example of infringement, consider the software brouhaha that erupted around Mentor Graphics.
 
A lot of these histories ignore just how hard MS was working to avoid going into the consumer OS market. MS sent IBM to DRI. MS tried to get IBM to buy SCP-DOS directly. IBM saw a chance to save $50,000 by letting a desperate supplier pay the costs of acquiring the OS. Oops.

Gary Kildall was impatient. If the new release wasn't immediately successful, it would be ignored even as other improvements would have made it viable. Networking, GEM, and CD-ROMs all followed that pattern where Kildall gave up on the product about a year before competitors took off.
 
Gary might not have succeeded like business expected him to succeed, but I read somewhere that he was actually pretty satisfied with what he did get, including the microsoft settlement.

It would have sucked to consider yourself successful only to be put down by others who failed to recognize that your own standards of success are in a different paradigm to what most people hold up as a standard of success.

The problem I think stems from people viewing success through eyes focussed on the big winners like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

But it was Gary who invented the modern computer and as history passes and the afterglow from the giants like Jobs and Gates dies out, I think people will better recognize that Gary's star still shines today, and future generations will have a view less distorted by wealth.

Kind of like how Tesla died in obscurity, but today probably has higher historical status than Marconi or Edison.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Come again?
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The modern computer - ie, With an operating system that is the same for different hardware configurations, and BIOS code to link between the hardware differences and the OS.

He took the hardware of the era and turned it into what could be recognized as the modern computer.

It's only am architectural perspective, since DR didn't make much hardware, but I'd argue IBM only refined what had already been established with CP/M and other manufacturer's hardware.

But there's a clear difference between most other computers of the era and the CP/M architecture.
 
cj7hawk said:
The modern computer - ie, With an operating system that is the same for different hardware configurations, and BIOS code to link between the hardware differences and the OS.

He took the hardware of the era and turned it into what could be recognized as the modern computer.

It's only am architectural perspective, since DR didn't make much hardware, but I'd argue IBM only refined what had already been established with CP/M and other manufacturer's hardware.

But there's a clear difference between most other computers of the era and the CP/M architecture.
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How many early mini- and micro-computer operating systems are you familiar with?
 
Chuck(G) said:
How many early mini- and micro-computer operating systems are you familiar with?
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Very few to none, depending on what "familiar" means. My timelines for computers begin in 1981 at 12 years old.

But I would assume you're a lot more familiar with them than I am. How many had a "BIOS" that would allow them to be ported to personal computers of the era? (and ran on processors suited to personal computers?)

I know a lot of concepts existed before CP/M but if there was a precedent to CP/M that Gary Kildall clearly copied and imitated, I'd love to hear more about it.
 
Let's take a look at "modern" PCs. Let's see, the two big competitors in the market are Windows 10 and macOS. Which uses a BIOS interface?
If I were to predict which early PC presaged the modern PC, it'd have to be the Apple II with its intrinsic color graphics.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I were to predict which early PC presaged the modern PC, it'd have to be the Apple II with its intrinsic color graphics.
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Windows 11 still has some of it's roots in MSDOS even if it's been rewritten out of the system - but evolution is impossible.
MacOS was based on Linux for a while, but I'd argue the Mac is *not* a modern PC architecture, but evolved from something earlier and is a carry over from earlier architectures.

So your suggestion that the Apple II was the progenitor to the Mac I'd certainly accept - even if they were made by different people and the early MACs were black and white.

But the PC architecture was never about color in the same way the Apple II was. Certainly users wanted color and got color, but the PC really was closer to an x86 CP/M machine than anything else I can think of and still uses the same command structure today, even if it evolved a lot.

And I'd describe modern computer architectures as an "Open" architecture ( rather than the Mac's closed architecture ) - ie, a way for LOTS of different ways to make the same thing, and make it backwards compatible forever. OK, some stuff gets lost, but I'd be surprised if it was possible to find a PC with Windows 11 that couldn't run at least something than came off of a disk from the original XT.

Also, I'd describe it as something anyone could make, modify and change, rather than the Mac's walled garden approach to architecture which is a lot more fixed and limited in terms of how it can be built, and has far less connection to it's roots than a PC outside of purely visual similarities.

Though the new PCs are certainly heading the same way as the Macs.

David.
 
krebizfan said:
One might notice a few similarities between CP/M and the OSes ISIS and Tops-10 which Kildall worked with.
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CP/M is pretty stripped down compared to TOPS-10 but yeah, I’d say the resemblance is impossible to ignore. DEC themselves essentially made a dumbed-down TOPS-10 called OS/8 for the PDP-8, which ”coincidentally” ended up looking more than a bit like CP/M.

cj7hawk said:
But it was Gary who invented the modern computer
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Ugh. People *really* need to stop doing this. No, he didn’t. No one person did.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
CP/M is pretty stripped down compared to TOPS-10 but yeah, I’d say the resemblance is impossible to ignore. DEC themselves essentially made a dumbed-down TOPS-10 called OS/8 for the PDP-8, which ”coincidentally” ended up looking more than a bit like CP/M.

Ugh. People *really* need to stop doing this. No, he didn’t. No one person did.
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Well, it's more true than to say "Edison invented the lightbulb" or "Marconi invented the radio" at least.

And as the article above mentioned by @Caluser2000 perhaps better stated;

"history has overlooked the contribution of Kildall, who Evans justifiably described as "the true founder of the personal computer revolution and the father of PC software" in a book published three years ago."

Is that a more agreeable version?
 
Chuck(G) said:
Let's take a look at "modern" PCs. Let's see, the two big competitors in the market are Windows 10 and macOS. Which uses a BIOS interface?
If I were to predict which early PC presaged the modern PC, it'd have to be the Apple II with its intrinsic color graphics.
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They both use a "BIOS" interface in the sense that the poster you responded to, meant. The CPM software architecture called "BIOS" which has allowed it to be extended to new hardware even today.
Both Apple hardware and Windows 10 (and Linux also) have created a series of defined interfaces where the layer above does not need to know the intricacies of the hardware implementation to e.g. write to disk, put graphics on screen, etc. Your software can read or write a file and whether you are using SCSI, SAS, SATA or NVME doesn't matter at all.
 
MrImprovement said:
They both use a "BIOS" interface in the sense that the poster you responded to, meant. The CPM software architecture called "BIOS" which has allowed it to be extended to new hardware even today.
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The technique of using modular "drivers" is very old and long predates CP/M and microprocessors (and probably ICs). If you're going to use that as the hallmark of a "Modern PC", you're going to have to shoot higher.
 
cj7hawk said:
Well, it's more true than to say "Edison invented the lightbulb" or "Marconi invented the radio" at least.
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How does that follow? What exactly was “novel” about the work?

The main *point* of having a “disk operating system” is hardware abstraction so user software isn’t stuck dealing directly with fiddling bits in the disk hardware and coming up with novel (and no doubt mutually incompatible) ways of organizing raw sectors into files inside every program. I mean, if you zoom out a little further you’ll find hardware abstraction is a fundamental part of ”efficient” computing; if you’re writing even a bare-bones machine language monitor the first thing you do is write reusable components for doing basic tasks like reading the keyboard and splatting letters out to an output device. It would be incredibly foolish to have to repeat that block of code every time you use it, right? And, obviously, because you did that it suddenly becomes possible for your work to be ported to other computers using the same CPU just my modifying those I/O routines.

The closest thing to novel about CP/M was that Kindall specifically built it with the plan of licensing it to manufacturers instead of tying it specifically to hardware he was going to sell himself. Do we say Ray Kroc “invented” the hamburger because he managed to sell a lot of them via point of sales he didn’t strictly own himself?
 
… and it also bears pointing out that despite CP/M’s multi-manufacturer licensing the most popular computers in the critical period between 1977 and 1981, by far, were all *not* CP/M machines. Radio Shack sold more TRS-80 Model Is than all CP/M computers put together over this span, and if we want to be cheeky and lump all of Commodore’s 8-bit computers starting with the PET together it’s fair to guess they sold more units than all CP/M-running computers put together, ever(*), by 1990. Bill Gates was probably right at the time when he said the one single most popular CP/M computer was an Apple II with a Z80 Softcard, and that was based on sales in the low-mid-five digits.

CP/M was the OS that ”computer professionals“ and businesses that got on the computer train early used (until better options came along) but in the grand scheme of things its contribution to the growth in popularity of personal computers is... debatable.

(*Side note: Commodore got a lot of flack for making a bunch of different lines of 6502-based computers that were “incompatible“ with each other, but if you dig into the structure of the Kernel OS they were all based around it’s actually impressive how much device-independence they built into their software; you can write programs at least as capable as CP/M programs that only use BIOS features that will run on almost any Commodore 8-bit. Sure, it wasn’t multi-manufacturer, but if the claim is that CP/M is special because “device independence“, well, it’s great evidence that the concept was already pretty universal and people were doing it better very early on.)
 
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