MS-DOS Paternity Suit

[MaceVanHoffen]

As a user of the ill-fated MS-DOS, I often screamed obscenities that called into question its author's legitimate parentage.  Little did I know that such crude epithets could be applied to MS-DOS itself ...

MS-DOS paternity dispute goes to court
By Andrew Orlowski
Published Thursday 3rd March 2005 14:58 GMT

The parentage of the MS-DOS operating system is to be decided in court. Tim Paterson, who sold the Intel-compatible operating system 86-DOS (aka QDOS) to Microsoft in 1980 is suing author and former Times editor Harold Evans, and his publisher Time Warner, for defamation. Paterson's work became Microsoft's first operating system - it subsequently rebadged QDOS as MS-DOS version 1.0, and it was made available with the original IBM PC.

In his book They Made America published last year, Evans devoted a chapter to the late, great Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research. Evans described Paterson's software as a "rip-off" and "a slapdash clone" of Kildall's CP/M, then the leading operating system for micro computers.

Paterson's Seattle Computer Products (SCP) made an 8086 plug-in card for the S-100 computer, and Paterson wrote an operating system to go with the board. His suit admits that he wanted the API for his operating system to be compatible with the market leader CP/M.

"Plaintiff felt that the format used by CP/M was a significant bottleneck so he turned to the Microsoft Stand-Alone Disk BASIC and used a File Allocation Table," the suit says. The resulting board and OS shipped in August 1980.

Paterson claims that Evans falsely accused Kildall of being the "inventor" of DOS, and for citing former Intel engineer, now Stanford lecturer John Wharton for pointing out that Paterson used Kildalls INT-21 mechanism "almost unaltered".

Paterson has endured "great pain and mental anguish" and is seeking "over $75,000" in damages, plus costs.

Is it wise? The case, should it come to court, will hinge on a technical evaluation of QDOS, and central to case is one document in particular. It's Paterson's original "Programer's Manual" (sic) for his operating system, illustrated here.

QDOS - Programer's Reference (sic)


Several weeks ago, Wharton told The Register that he hadn't been contacted by Evans or his researchers, and that the quotes used in the book were several years old.

Evans says he'll "vigorously contest" the defamation claims.

[Sky]

Paterson has endured "great pain and mental anguish" and is seeking "over $75,000" in damages, plus costs.

All other things aside, I rule for a vicious ass beating and an explanation that "great pain and mental anguish" is what most people call life.

[HaemishM]

GEEK SLAP FIGHT!

My pocket protector is better than yours!

[Paelos]

GEEK SLAP FIGHT!

My pocket protector is better than yours!

Nah, let's have a GEEK KNIFE FIGHT!

[Murgos]

I still use DR DOS for a number of things.  Mostly for a set of boot floppies with networking and various utilities in case a hard drive gets corrupted and I need to try and repair/recover it or move data off it.

I thought it was well known that MS-DOS was an almost verbatim rip of CP/M (later DR DOS).  The story was something like, IBM needed a disk operating system for its new personal computer idea and Kildall, being a hippy freak who didn't want nothing to do with the man, refused to do business with them.  Later they had a meeting with Gates and he said "If you license BASIC I'll chip in a DOS for cheap."  A weekend of reverse engineering later and MS-DOS was born and the rest is Microsoft.

[Sky]

Heh, reminds me of a Piers Anthony bit about the Captain and Miss Dos.

[WayAbvPar]

Heh, reminds me of a Piers Anthony bit about the Captain and Miss Dos.

I am guessing Miss Dos was a hypersexual 8 year old.

[Paelos]

I never heard of this writer until I came here and Haemish started spewing hate about him. How can he continue to write such crap?

[Sky]

I used to read Piers when I was younger, I never knew about any pedophelia until Hammy raged about it, either. I thought he was just a mediocre fantasy writer with a penchant for puns.

But hey, teh hate is so cool.

[schild]

What does that have to do with "teh hate?"

[MaceVanHoffen]

I used to read Piers when I was younger, I never knew about any pedophelia until Hammy raged about it, either. I thought he was just a mediocre fantasy writer with a penchant for puns.

But hey, teh hate is so cool.

I liked Piers Anthony up until the 4th Xanth novel or so.  Then he just got derivative.  I never noticed any paedophilia, but then it's been a long time since I read any of this work.

[HaemishM]

I never read the Xanth stuff, but tried to read 2 of Anthony's books, Firefly and the first book in the Incarnations of Immortality series. DREK. I make fun of him for being a pedophile because Firefly is just really fucking weird, about some big kind of firefly monster thing that lures people with sexual pheremones and then sucks them dry to death. Nonsexual children, etc. I couldn't finish either book. His writing style reminds me of that unwashed geek with the lisp you always see hanging around in the game store no matter what time you go in. If you are unlucky, he attempts to engage you (and anyone else) in conversation about whatever RPG rules set he is whacking off to lately, trying to explain why this section of the rules doesn't work and joking about things like sex in RPG's. All while showering you with the spittle of the unloved and unwashed. And that is how Anthony writes, only with the literary equivalent of hentai tentacle rape and worse-than-George-Lucas-style romantic dialogue.

EDIT: Piers Anthony is the Uwe Boll of science fiction novels.

[SirBruce]

There have been some rants written about Piers Anthony's sexual strangeness that you should be able to find floating around on the web.  Many of the Xanth books deal with teenage or younger characters, and there's a lot of sexual innuendo and jokes flying about (along with other jokes).  Combine that with a couple of explicit short stories from Anthonology and you've got plenty of grist for the mill.

However, Piers is okay in my book because he used to own Basenjis, and he wrote the Incarnations of Immortality series.  I encourage anyone who wants to give his writing a try to read those instead of the Xanth books.  The first three are great, the 4th sucked, the 5th was better, and No.s 6 and 7 were mediocre.

Bruce

[shiznitz]

Xanth was free of pedophilia. Bio of a Space Tyrant had some graphic teenage sex. The Incarnations of Immortality had a plotline about a very young girl and an adult man getting persecuted by society for their "forbidden love." Then Firefly just laid it all out there.

It was a progression.

[WayAbvPar]

As Bruce pointed out, even the Xanth stuff is filled with innuendo, not to mention the vivid descriptions of the nubile females. Bio was a jerkfest (the main character fucked pretty much every female he ever encountered, for better or for worse), and BattleCircle had a sexual relationship between a young girl and an older man, IIRC.

I actually enjoyed most of the Incarnations series (when I read them 5 million years ago), and I liked the Blue Adept series as well- just an interesting world.

[SirBruce]

There's plenty of pedophilia and mysonginistic stuff from Xanth.  I refer you to here, and quote some of the highlights:

        1 A SPELL FOR CHAMELEON (1977)
A surprisingly good book. Forget the creepy misogynistic idea that
Chameleon represents "all women" by being dumb an' pretty part of the
month, average looks and intelligence part of the month and ugly and
smart part of the month.  Forget the "date rape" scene where the judge
(during the new, "fair" method of trial) determines that the guy
COULDN'T be guilty of rape because the girl was on a date with him
(and she was probably a slut and lying anyway).
[....]
   10 VALE OF THE VOLE (1987)
Wrote a LONG review of this for rec.arts.sf.written about a year ago:
Skanky old female demoness (read Djinni, not Satan) decides she wants
to molest a 15 year old kid. This is NOT presented as teenage wish
fulfillment (which I wouldn't mind, particularly). There's a creepy
scene where she tries to get into the kid's pants: it's played for
laughs. A secondary plot is that Demons are running amok and polluting
one of Xanth's major waterways. The kid (and his friends) try to get
someone interested. No one cares, particularly. Oh, and Humphrey is
missing. No one care much about this either. As a side note, another
female character tries to hook up with the kid, so as to get part of
his soul. (Two recurring themes in Anthony are: that souls are
divisible, but regrow eventually, and women want to trap men.)

Very bad.

        11 HEAVEN CENT (1988)
Vile: A nine year old kid (written as a dim three year old, or as a 40
year old, depending on the need of the moment) decides to go on a
quest (to find Humphrey who's been missing for 3 years) and no-one
much minds. On his quest, nearly every female he meets tries to molest
him. Attempted sex with this 9 year old is involved in every (or
almost every) encounter he has with a female (maybe 3 or 4 in all). No
one much minds. Real healthy message, Piers: "Hey kids, if someone
touches you in a way that you don't like, it's no big deal and it's
not worth telling anyone, 'cause they won't care".
[...]
     15 THE COLOR OF HER PANTIES (1992)
More creepy underwear fetish, more man-hungry babes out a'huntin' fer
husbands. Sexist AND icky. Oh. And her panties were plaid.

Bruce
PS - The USENET thread it generated can be found here on google.

[Sky]

Hmm. Yeah, I guess I could see it a little. Never read Firefly. Read Xanth when I was young, as he was writing them, iirc. Also read the Blue Adept series, the first couple Incarnation books, and the Bio books were being passed around various road people when I was out with the band, I read most or all of them.

Anthonology...yeah, some doozies in there...and I think that's where he told that bit about his word processors I mentioned (where he talks about the OS he was using as well). Between that book and King's short stories (Night Shift?), my fragile teenage mind was pretty warped.

Bruce - I think it's far sicker to try and find these things in these books than to just read them and enjoy them as works of fantasy. I was never creeped out by those books...but I am by the person who wrote those quotes.

[SirBruce]

I do agree that when I read the early books, those things didn't really bother me, either, at the time.  But the author finds the recurring theme running through several, and it aparrently gets worse in later novels.  I never read past the first Xanth book, myself.  But I do recommend that Incarnations ones.

Bruce

[HaemishM]

I had the Incarnations stuff recommended to me, and as I said above, tried to read it. I made it through less of that than Firefly. It was just awful; horrible writing style. See above description of the stinky cheese gamer.

[Stephen Zepp]

Firefly sucked, period. Haemish is absolutely right on that one!

Battle Circle did have the relationship mentioned, but it didn't become sexual until well after she reached maturity--just because our modern day society calls 17.999 too young and 18.000 as good to go doesn't mean that every book ever written by authors has to follow the same legal definition.

Some favorites by Anthony:

Cthor/Cthon
Tarot series--highly sexually oriented, but then again it was basically about a battle between Heaven and Hell, and what's Hell without temptation?
Split Infinity (the first three of the Blue Adept series)
Battle Circle

None of Anthony's work is ever going to win style awards, but a lot of it can be given a "fun to read" label!

[AOFanboi]

I liked half the Incarnations books: Riding a Pale Horse (Death, the first one) is good at setting up the story. The "living backwards" premise of Bearing an Hourglass (Time) was intriguing. With a Tangled Skein (Fate) was too weird - but it introduces Satan as a more central character. Never read The Green Mother (Nature) or Wielding a Red Sword (War).

For Love of Evil (Satan) was good in that it sort of summarised his appearances in the other books and gave a reasonable background, and And Eternity concludes the series, where they decide God is not doing his job. This introduces an even more poerful entity, Nox (or "night"), but apparently no book came about. Piers Anthony SUCKS when it comes to actually comcluding a series - he shares this trait with Orson Scott Card.

Best "incarnation" concept is still Neil Gaiman's Endless (Sandman series) for DC.

[SirBruce]

The 5th book relates strongly to the 3rd and the 6th, so you should enjoy those two.

The 4th book is really the odd one of the bunch.  It's short, it's boring, and the character barely relates to the other Incarnations is any meaningful way.  And he gets secondary "minor" incarnations that hang out with him.

Bruce