EvanK
VCFed Founder
Did MS-DOS use code copied from CP/M? Forensic software engineer Bob Zeidman said "no" in 2012 but now he has new research to disclose at VCF West.
That's all I can say for now.
That's all I can say for now.
So no CP/M has no DOS code but DOS started as an illegal translation of CP/M.
Got any good references Freedos is based from DRDOS.After the PC came out some continued to replace "CP/M" but again in pieces you still had to have CP/M to have a complete package. Caldera (DRI) finally release CP/M-86 that had morphed into DRDOS to public domain (freedos).
Randy
...I thought the subject was "DOS code in CP/M", not "CP/M code in DOS"....
Just saying...
It went to court, Microsoft was found guilty. There was a fine. There was a settlement.
The scuttlebutt is it wasn't reversed engineered, it was taken from original sources that were covered in a non-disclosure agreement.
IBM had contracted with both DRI and M$, DRI was to provide the DOS and M$ the basic.
As usual in the early computer days DRI was way behind schedule, IBM asked M$ if they could write a DOS. M$ knew 86-DOS was a stolen product but DRI hadn't brought legal action yet. So M$ said they could do it all by buying 86-DOS and selling it as Microsoft DOS.
IBM found themselves in a legal quagmire and paid the fine and agreed to sell CP/M-86.
M$ never ported their Gee-Whiz basic (GWBasic) to CP/M-86 and IBM decided to complete their legal requirements by selling CP/M-86 for four times the cost of DOS and no basic to boot.
Randy
CPM-80 preceeded DOS by years. So you won't find DOS code in CPM, but you will find the Digital Research CPM-80 Copyright Notice and Code inside DOS 1.0 since whole sections of code were lifted from CPM-80 illegally when Seattle Computer ported CPM-80 without authorization into the 16-bit Operating System that Seattle licensed to Microsoft to sell to IBM for sale with 8088 based PCs. A friend of mine from back when I worked for Radio Shack showed me the Digital Research Copyright Notice inside of DOS 1.0 that he discovered while he was working inside of DOS. I think he was trying to find the location of the DOS serial number at the time.
This was the basis of the lawsuit that Seattle filed against Microsoft. Seattle never licensed Microsoft to sell DOS on any other platform/processor besides the IBM PC with 8088 processor. Seattle had a mysterious fire that put them out of the active retail S-100 computer selling business, but the lawsuit lingered on for years, until Microsoft finally settled with Seattle (paying them off, I think it was a token 1 million or 5 million dollars).
FreeDOS has _nothing_ to do with DR-DOS, Novell DOS, or OpenDOS beyond the fact that it's MS-DOS compatible.
Gotta call "shenanigans" on this one, sorry.
You can find 86-DOS 1.0 here There is no mention of Digital Research in it. I've grepped the binaries for every pattern that might match and can't find a single instance. The same for my copy of PCDOS 1.1 and MS-DOS 1.26.
Further, "reverse engineering" in 1980, as long as it did not plagiarize code directly or rely on trade secrets was completely legitimate in 1980. There was a whole pile of lawsuits during the 1980s as to what constituted software plagiarism, so there's plenty of case law on this. This was all before DMCA.