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To: KellyAdmirer
Kelly, I am not splitting hairs. This is the history of the personal computer.

Gates did not OWN QDOS when he sold it to IBM as MS-DOS. At the time, IBM thought they were dealing with a much larger company than Microsoft was. Gates had written a version of BASIC for the Altair, Apple, Commodore and several other companies, so had a track record, but he had never written an Operating System. IBM approached him as a consultant to discuss what would be appropriate for their soon to be released PC.

He suggested they talk to Gary Kildall about acquiring CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). They did try but Kildall was apparently not available (out flying his plane, it's said) and his wife and lawyer refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Frustrated with Kildall, IBM offered Gates the contract to WRITE an OS. Bill Gates had a contract in hand and had to deliver something he did not own. He had no Operating System. With that contract in hand, Gates licensed Q-DOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products.

Basically, Q-DOS was a reverse engineered, simplified version of CP/M. Gates and company then refined and improved on Q-DOS and delivered PC-DOS 1.0. IBM found that, after testing, product contained over 300 bugs in about 6000 lines of code... it also appeared to contain unmodified code from CP/M (vehemently denied by Paterson even as late as 2004) which was a legal problem. IBM demanded a re-write. Gates bought the next version of Q-DOS, 86-DOS outright (Exclusive righs) from Paterson's company and Microsoft hired Tim Paterson to do the re-write. PC/MS-DOS was born.

Was this wrong? Nope. Just smart business.

100 posted on 02/04/2007 12:50:20 AM PST by Swordmaker (Remember, the proper pronunciation of IE is "AAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE!)
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To: Swordmaker

Well, you have a good grasp of the intricacies of this. IBM wanted the Digital Research code, and got it by having Gates find some guy who basically had copied it and "improved" it. But whether or not the original code came from IBM, or Digital Research, or some guy living in a townhouse in Seattle isn't really the issue. The idea is that Gates built on that foundation, just as Jobs built on the foundation created by Xerox. I don't even see that there is a dispute about any of this - even the Apple people you quoted give due acknowledgement to Xerox.


103 posted on 02/04/2007 1:01:36 AM PST by KellyAdmirer
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To: Swordmaker
He suggested they talk to Gary Kildall about acquiring CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). They did try but Kildall was apparently not available (out flying his plane, it's said) and his wife and lawyer refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

IIRC, Kildall died a while back under rather mysterious circumstances. Rumors at the time were that he killed himself due to his never getting over the missed opportunity to get in on the IBM PC gravy train. He was major player in the early days of personal computing and watching Gates whiz by him was unbearable, so I've heard.

132 posted on 02/04/2007 3:57:28 AM PST by jalisco555 ("Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us and pigs treat us as equals" Winston Churchill)
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