"The 'Quick-and-Dirty Operating System' Would be the Foundation"
| Tim
Paterson might be the guy you've been griping about. He's the anonymous
one you've growled at when an unexpected "A" prompt appears or when a
microcomputer's memory just isn't what you'd wish it could be. Hindsight is 20-20, of course, but Paterson admits he would do a few things differently if he had known five years ago that the "Quick-and- Dirty Operating System (internally known appropriately as QDOS) he was piecing together would be the foundation for millions of microcom- puters today. The project became, of course, MS-DOS, which Paterson, as an em- |
| ployee
of Seattle Computer Prod-ucts, Inc., wrote in 1980 on a con-tract
for Microsoft Corporation, which had a job with an unnamed "major OEM." "The thing was they needed to get something really quick," Paterson recalls. "I figured later I'd go back and work out the finished operating system with multitasking and all that." As to eventual memory limita-tions, well, "in 1980, who would've thought that 64 megabytes was going to be considered not big enough?" And admittedly, the so-called 86 DOS he churned out in just two |
| months is the ancestor of the MS-DOS or PS-DOS in use today. Both Microsoft's and IBM's own programmers had a hand in develop-ing the version eventually released with the IBM Personal Computer in August 1981, as well as in spear-heading subseuqent revisions of the product. Paterson wrote DOS in 8080 assem-bly language on a Zilog, Inc., Z80 machine and translated it to the 8086 system. Microsoft paid $50,000 for it in 1981. Last year alone, Microsoft's sys-tems software sales (including MS-DOS) were $75 million, just over half of the company's total revenue. |
This is what Business Computer Systems,
c 1981, 1983, 1984, a book by David M. Kroenke and Kathleen A. Dolan
says about the origins of DOS. It is more or less accurate, although
Baker Publishing may disagree slightly about the way the code was
written, as can be shown by later reference to the copy command and our interpretation of how the milennium bug was solved. .
Tim Paterson might be the guy you've
been griping about. He's the anonymous one you've growled at when an
unexpected "A" prompt appears or when a microcomputer's memory just
isn't what you'd wish it could be.
Hindsight is 20-20, of course, but
Paterson admits he would do a few things differently if he had known five years ago that the "Quick-and-
Dirty Operating System (internally known appropriately as QDOS) he was piecing together would be the foundation for millions of microcom- puters today.
The project became, of course, MS-DOS, which Paterson, as an employee of Seattle Computer Products, Inc., wrote in 1980 on a con-tract for Microsoft Corporation, which had a job with an unnamed "major OEM."
"The thing was they needed to get something really quick," Paterson recalls. "I figured later I'd go back and work out the finished operating system with multitasking and all that."
As to eventual memory limitations, well, "in 1980, who would've thought that 64 megabytes was going to be considered not big enough?"
And admittedly, the so-called 86 DOS he churned out in just two
months is the ancestor of the MS-DOS or PS-DOS in use today.
Both Microsoft's and IBM's own programmers had a hand in develop-ing the version eventually released with the IBM Personal Computer in August 1981, as well as in spear-heading subseuqent revisions of the product.
Paterson wrote DOS in 8080 assembly language on a Zilog, Inc., Z80 machine and translated it to the 8086 system. Microsoft paid $50,000 for it in 1981.
Last year alone, Microsoft's sys-tems software sales (including MS-DOS) were $75 million, just over half of the company's total revenue.
Hindsight is 20-20, of course, but
Paterson admits he would do a few things differently if he had known five years ago that the "Quick-and-
Dirty Operating System (internally known appropriately as QDOS) he was piecing together would be the foundation for millions of microcom- puters today.
The project became, of course, MS-DOS, which Paterson, as an employee of Seattle Computer Products, Inc., wrote in 1980 on a con-tract for Microsoft Corporation, which had a job with an unnamed "major OEM."
"The thing was they needed to get something really quick," Paterson recalls. "I figured later I'd go back and work out the finished operating system with multitasking and all that."
As to eventual memory limitations, well, "in 1980, who would've thought that 64 megabytes was going to be considered not big enough?"
And admittedly, the so-called 86 DOS he churned out in just two
months is the ancestor of the MS-DOS or PS-DOS in use today.
Both Microsoft's and IBM's own programmers had a hand in develop-ing the version eventually released with the IBM Personal Computer in August 1981, as well as in spear-heading subseuqent revisions of the product.
Paterson wrote DOS in 8080 assembly language on a Zilog, Inc., Z80 machine and translated it to the 8086 system. Microsoft paid $50,000 for it in 1981.
Last year alone, Microsoft's sys-tems software sales (including MS-DOS) were $75 million, just over half of the company's total revenue.
After this Microsoft went on as a software selling entity, to produce the other versions of DOS (Disk Operating System) DOS-3, DOS-5
(which introduced commands such as SmartDrive (smartdrv), and then
Windows-95, Windows 98, the Windows 2000 series, and finally
Windows-XP, which is the same operating system, rewritten and
recompiled into a tidier, neater package, incorporating the GoToMyPc
features removed from the previous versions. It should be noted that
NEC in Japan, a company completely independant of Microsoft, and a
rival in the lucrative software market, produced their own version of
DOS-5, and released it just two days before Microsoft released theirs.
There are subtle differences, and Asian Computers run Asian or NEC DOS.
How NEC achieved this feat we have still not been told.
Microsoft also sells a range of game software for the PC, such as their Microsoft Flight Simulator series, and office software, such as Microsoft Money, and Microsoft Office, which grew from the original Lotus Suite software developed by Lotus, Intel and Microsoft (LIM) for the PC.
Microsoft also sells a range of game software for the PC, such as their Microsoft Flight Simulator series, and office software, such as Microsoft Money, and Microsoft Office, which grew from the original Lotus Suite software developed by Lotus, Intel and Microsoft (LIM) for the PC.