

Did Bill Gates Steal the Heart of DOS? - akh
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/did-bill-gates-steal-the-heart-of-dos

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epo
A lame, meandering shaggy dog story written by someone who gives the
impression he has never seen a programming language before in his life
'Breaking this statement down, I determined that “jnz” was a standard program
assembly language statement for “jump if not zero.”'. This guy supposedly does
this for a living? This is ieee.org/software not The Sun (a british daily
tabloid which caters for the retarded)

More sloppy still, part of the basis for this "investigation" is stuff
downloaded from the web, which renders it devoid of any evidential value
whatsoever.

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rbanffy
> part of the basis for this "investigation" is stuff downloaded from the web

Actually, I thought that was the most clever thing in the whole investigation
- using web searches to gauge how frequently constructs appear together can be
used to flag areas for closer investigation.

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ks
_"And that is that. Every lead brought me not to Bill Gates but to a dead end.
QDOS was absolutely not copied from CP/M, and MS-DOS showed no signs of
copying either. Kildall’s accusations about Bill Gates were totally
groundless."_

This article has a refreshing view of the story with lots of details. Instead
of the classic "Bill Gates took advantage of Kildall" story that is often
repeated, this is more about the many poor business decisions on Kildall's
part. If this story is accurate, it would seem that Microsoft saw an opening
when Kildall couldn't close the deal with IBM and took it. I don't see
anything wrong with that.

~~~
rbanffy
Legend says Mary Gates' friendship with the then current IBM CEO played a role
in IBM's favoring Microsoft's OS that didn't exist by then.

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jcmhn
I hope that the author was taking liberties with technical details to make it
read like a detective story.

If that is how computer forensics really work, then the field is snake oil of
the worst sort. I can understand how foolishness like the SCO and Oracle copy
claims would arise from this sort of... I'm not even sure what to call it, it
doesn't have the rigor of astrology.

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tzs
Sherlock Holmes would not be wearing a deerstalker. That's a hat for traveling
and for doing things in rural areas. Holmes' profession requires blending in,
and wearing a rural hat in a non-rural environment would stand out.

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tylermenezes
The Jerry Pournelle/TWiT thing struck me as extremely odd. Is it really okay
that someone who's a reporter makes statements that "he wrote the command down
but has never shown it to anyone"? I'm not about to believe anything to do
with him, anymore.

Other than that, I was surprised at how little the author seemed to actually
know about programming. One doesn't have to be an expert in low-level
languages to be a fantastic programmer nowadays, true, but if you're running a
computer forensics firm?

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greenyoda
The title makes no sense. Even if QDOS had been copied from CP/M, it wouldn't
have been Bill Gates who stole it. It would have been the guy who sold it to
Bill Gates, and Gates would have had no way of knowing that it was stolen.

