
There’s a $200k reward for anyone who proves Microsoft ripped off MS-DOS source - bndr
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/08/theres-a-200k-reward-for-anyone-who-proves-microsoft-ripped-off-ms-dos-source-code/
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dspillett
> 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 that list. Heck, even hard drives would have been
unsupported until version 2 IIRC.

~~~
_0ffh
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.

~~~
groovy2shoes
> _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.

------
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.

~~~
ThinkBeat
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS)

~~~
ninkendo
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.

------
andrewstuart
DOS has been so thoroughly analysed, reverse engineered, examined and hex
dumped by very very smart people that if such a function existed it would have
been detected LONG LONG ago. There is no such function.

~~~
nailer
(the function being referred to in the comment above is the one that allegedly
prints Kildall's name)

------
dmix
Some context from the QDOS wiki posted below

> Controversy has continued to surround the similarity between the two
> systems. Perhaps the most sensational claim comes from Jerry Pournelle, who
> claims that Kildall personally demonstrated to him that DOS contained CP/M
> code by entering a command in DOS that displayed Kildall's name; as of 2006
> Pournelle has not revealed the command and nobody has come forward to
> corroborate his story. A 2004 book about Kildall says that he used such an
> encrypted message to demonstrate that other manufacturers had copied CP/M,
> but does not say that he found the message in DOS; instead Kildall's memoir
> (a source for the book) pointed to the well-known interface similarity.
> Paterson insists that the 86-DOS software was his original work, and has
> denied referring to or otherwise using CP/M code while writing it. After the
> 2004 book appeared, he sued the authors and publishers for defamation. The
> court ruled in summary judgement that no defamation had occurred, as the
> book's claims were opinions based on research or were not provably false.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS)

If this command existed in MSDOS this most certainly would have come up in
court for far more than $100k by now, no? This is a good way to dispell the
myth though.

~~~
phire
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".

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

~~~
phire
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.

~~~
rbanffy
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 remarkable and, maybe, worth fighting for.
Unfortunately, Kildall had other demons to fight.

~~~
groovy2shoes
> _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.

~~~
rbanffy
That's true, of course. That doesn't make his accomplishment, to pull this off
on severely limited machines, any less remarkable. And that's not mentioning
he wrote the language to do it.

~~~
groovy2shoes
Of course. Good point!

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Waterluvian
How is it possible to not find the Kildall function if it's there? Isnt it a
pretty tiny haystack for today's standards?

~~~
scholia
If it were there, you'd have to assume that Bob Zeidman would have found it.
He's spent enough time looking. He therefore feels safe in offering $200,000
for it, which makes the whole thing look like more of a publicity stunt....

~~~
phire
If he really wanted the truth, he would offer $100,000 to anyone who could
prove the existence of the Kildall command in CP/M.

Once we know what it is, we can easily prove if the command does or doesn't
exist in MSDOS.

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nailer
> He did, however, find at least 22 system calls — the types of actions that
> send/receive text from a printer, phone, hard disk, etc. — that had the same
> function (and function number) as the CP/M code.

Older programmers: what are function numbers? Thanks.

~~~
EvanAnderson
The real-mode DOS system call interface is based on loading a function number
into the AH register, other arguments in other registers, and calling
interrupt 21h. I haven't used CP/M before, but it sounds like the DOS function
numbers must be numbered in a similar fashion as their CP/M equivalents.

Edit:

This list of BDOS system calls bears a passing resemblance, based on my foggy
memory, to some of the interrupt 21h calls I remember:
[http://www.seasip.info/Cpm/bdos.html](http://www.seasip.info/Cpm/bdos.html)
The conventions with arguments in registers is different, however.

~~~
linker3000
From a link I posted in response to another comment about the calls:

    
    
        [SNIP]
    
        ;**********************************************************
        ;*					    	              *
        ;*		      Get the time from DOS		      *
        ;*							      *
        ;**********************************************************
    
        MOV	AH,2CH	;Set up DOS call to get the current time
        INT 21H ;And go get it!
    
        [SNIP]
    
        MOV	AX,04C00	;Return to DOS
        INT 21H

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Lan
>He found no evidence it was copied and reported his findings in a piece
titled ‘Did Bill Gates Steal the Heart of DOS?‘.

More supporting evidence that any title that ends in a question mark can be
safely summed up as 'No'.

------
andrewstuart
Ask Tim Paterson - he probably doesn't stand to lose too much now from telling
the truth - assuming "the truth" is any different from conventional wisdom,
which of course, it isn't.

------
kgc
Didn't Microsoft buy DOS to make MS-DOS?

~~~
rando444
Bill Gates licensed something called QDOS which was made by Tim Paterson at
Seattle Computer Products, which Tim had designed to mimick CP/M's API.

~~~
cptskippy
I heard somewhere that he bought a CP/M manual at RadioShack and based much of
his work off of that.

~~~
rbanffy
IIRC, a lot, if not all, of CP/M was written in PL/M, but the 8086 was
designed to make porting assembly code from the 8080/8085 easy, so, I'd assume
a disassembly would be easy to automatically port to a 8086/8088\. If there is
some Easter egg Kildall left it was, probably, in those syscall identifiers.
Are they discontinuous or something like that?

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slededit
The source code for DOS is now public. Go verify it yourself:
[http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-
early-...](http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-source-
code/)

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dorkalorka
Complete with denigration of women. Nice, thanks for posting...

~~~
brudgers
I don't understand.

~~~
dorkalorka
"like a little girl"

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

~~~
brazzledazzle
It might be more charitable to assume that it's a reference to the perception
that women are more emotional. I'm not saying that perception is valid or
invalid but it's certainly more neutral than "women are weaker than men".

That said it could be an artifact of a time where it was acceptable to say
that kind of stuff. Like watching old movies reading old articles can be a bit
jarring at times. But getting upset with someone for posting it to support a
point is unfair.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It might be more charitable to assume that it's a reference to the
> perception that women are more emotional. I'm not saying that perception is
> valid or invalid but it's certainly more neutral than "women are weaker than
> men".

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

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
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 strong willed. Even at a young
age, we can already see that he is not the type of person who will allow
himself to be taken advantage of. Despite his sometimes irritating
emotionality, there is simply no way I could ever characterize him as weak.

Does that help?

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

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

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

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

