Something interesting, and I’m not casting aspersions here, but it should be mentioned, with respect to my link above to the Tim Paterson Wiki page.

Although it’s widely known that he worked for SCP, and while there, created QDOS for S-100 based systems, it’s only mentioned in a couple of minor footnotes that he actually did work for Digital Research too - CP/M related stuffs. To find that info, you’ll need to rifle through some bio stuff on Gary himself. I might be able to dig up a reference or two if you can’t find one.

Now, I’ve never seen anywhere that Gary made any disparaging remarks about Tim Paterson, but he was all over Bill Gates wrt ‘stealing’ parts of his code, … Which is kinda Ironic, coz Paterson wrote the IBM PC-DOS 1.01 that was released, and those early MS-DOS versions, working at times both under contract to Microsoft as an employee of SCP and later, directly for Microsoft on DOS and other projects as well. I believe that as late as MS-DOS 3.xx that Microsoft was still compiling DOS on an S-100 system (I may be mistaken).

Anyway, I wanted to offer you a couple of my all-time fav quotes:

“Ask Bill why the string in [MS-DOS] function 9 is terminated by a dollar sign. Ask him, because he can’t answer. Only I know that.” - Dr. Gary Kildall.

That’s one of the disparaging remarks that I found Ironic - Bill Gates didn’t, AFAIK, write ANY DOS code himself in the first place - it was all Paterson. So who is Gary ultimately pointing the finger at?

And then there’s this:

“IBM wanted CP/M prompts. It made me throw up.” - Tim Paterson.

Now there’s a conundrum, lolz…

Tim has always maintained that the creation of DOS was a completely original and unique design of his own, choosing FAT was an important decision too on his part, but it does sill beg the question, “Why is F9 terminated by a dollar sign?”

I’ve received some really intuitive background info from Mike MacGirvin, @[email protected] , for which I am more than grateful for, his insight as to some of the reasoning wasn’t based in the least on the saga, but actual practices at the time, so it’s reasonable, informed supposition, but enlightening.

Regardless, We all know why Bill gates doesn’t know the answer, lolz… all (or at least most) of that kind of work was performed by other folks while he fiddled with his baby - BASIC.

Enjoy!

#tallship

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