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Tim Paterson has basically said that he bought a book on CPM and then renamed the API calls for QDOS. For instance (hypothetical example) if CPM had "OpenSerialPort" then Paterson might have created the same API but named it "SerialPortOpen". Note I'm not saying that Paterson did anything illegal.

This is an interesting video but I am not able to determine what series it is from: https://dai.ly/x2xzxzo it does have interviews with Gates, Ballmer, Paul Allen, Tim Paterson, and Jack Sams of IBM etc.

Tim Paterson appears about 5m50s into the video and directly states that he had a book on CPM and used that as the basis.



And Gary seems to have copied the command line style (COPY, DEL, etc.) from DEC. I don't think he did anything wrong with that, either.

Gary got first crack at a deal with IBM. He declined it. Bill then stepped in.

I don't see any way Gary was wronged by Bill here.


CP/M didn't have COPY, did it? It used PIP like the DEC mini OSes it was modelled on.

PIP $destination = $source


Yeah, PIP. It's been a while :-/





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