Moe Trin wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Jun 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux, in article
> <87tzfhfvu8.fsf@thumper.dhh.gt.org>, John Hasler wrote:
>
>> Man-wai Chang ToDie wrote:
>>> ON the other hand, Mr. Gates is basically a DOS guy. And DOS got its
>>> ideas from Unix, I boldly claim...
>
> No
>
>> MSDOS got all its ideas (and some of its code) from CP/M, which got many of
>> its ideas from TOPS-10 and other DEC OS's.
>
> Do you believe Eric S. Raymond and the Jargon file?
>
> :MS-DOS: /M·S·dos/, n
>
> [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A {clone} of {CP/M} for the 8088
> crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle
> Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty
> Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.
> Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for IBM on
> time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including vaguely
> Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
> redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and
> subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible
> versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree
> on basic things like what character to use as an option switch or
> whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now the
>
> [snippity]
>
> That definition continues for 21 lines, and the items for 'CP/M' and
> 'DEC' would be enlightening to some.
>
> Old guy


That definition is accurate.