Did Bill Gates Steal the Heart of DOS? | Hacker News Reader

Did Bill Gates Steal the Heart of DOS?

spectrum.ieee.org

14 pointsakh9 comments

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.

> 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.

As someone who is even more unfamiliar with low level programming languages and forensics, I would greatly appreciate some elaboration on your comment. What exactly gives you the impression that he is such a novice - You pointed to a quote about the "jnz" statement but I'm unclear as to how that points to the author's inexperience.

Also despite the fact that the author seems inexperienced, would you say his conclusions are credible?

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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