Talk:Bill Gates
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
DOS source code
From the current version of the article:
"He started Microsoft, after reportedly cutting open source code from UNIX down to a basic Disk Output System (DOS) and making it proprietary.[citation needed] MS-DOS."
I think that is, or was, matter of (specialized) debate. Some analysis showed that it is not a copy over. Can't think of the article that I was reading but if I remember correct the person that looked at it made some effort to get the source code for evaluation and those parts that are identical to some degree, are above suspicion. Any ideas? - Sunvalley (talk) 21:26, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
- "PC DOS version 1.0, which supported only floppy disks, was shipped when IBM first released their PC in August 1981. Microsoft then substantially rewrote the software to support subdirectories and hard disks; version 2.0 was released with the IBM PC-XT" in March of 1983." source; https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-ms-dos-early-source-code/
- http://www.patersontech.com/dos/softalk.aspx < this page notes 300 change requests they made, but I can't find a live copy. Maybe this helps you? Jun (talk) 05:24, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
- Thanks. The article I was thinking of is this one (Was DOS copied from CP/M?). So the discussion as far as I understand (and the technical details in programming are way above my head .. but anyway) is, if he copied from CP/M for what would become PC-DOS. Wikipedia notes that: "IBM PC DOS (and the separately sold MS-DOS) and its predecessor, 86-DOS, was based on Digital Research's CP/M—the dominant disk operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 microcomputers—but instead ran on Intel 8086 16-bit processors."
- the author of the first article, Bob Zeidman, says from his analysis this is not the case (at one point he was retained by Microsoft as an expert witness in Motorola Mobility v. Microsoft). Unix is for the most part not mentioned in those discussions. Can't make much of it but search results for PC-DOS+Unix shows next to nothing. So is: "reportedly cutting open source code from UNIX down to a basic Disk Output System (DOS) and making it proprietary" valid? I think maybe not, but I am not the expert.
- My guess is then, that the question is, if he had taken source code from CP/M - not Unix. "Kildall's claims that the API and look and feel of 86-DOS had been copied from CP/M." / but source code claims seem to be wrong. As easy solution I would remove that sentence, maybe later write something about Kildall's claims. --Sunvalley (talk) 02:55, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
