A lot of what you are posting is simply wrong.

From 1978 to 1983 I was with Heathkit and Zenith Data Systems and was
the product line director for all computers and their operating systems.
We had contracts with both Digitial Research and Microsoft for all of
their products, the same contracts that other OEMs had, and I personally
knew and worked with both Gary Kildall and Bill Gates. And, as a
hobbyist, on my own, I bought 86-DOS and the hardware to run it on
directly from Seattle Computer Products (this was a personal purchase,
not directly related to my employment, and I still have both that
hardware and the software).

In all of that, I had NEVER heard of QDOS until recently. The product
was always referred to as 86-DOS. QDOS (Q-DOS?) (Quick and Dirty
Operating System, I believe) was the initial name that was used
internally, but that name was abandoned early ... before I bought the
product (from an ad in BYTE magazine), and I have version 0.33 and
possibly version 0.10 (up through version 2.0 .... all supplied on
8-inch diskettes). There was a version 1.0 of the product, although it
might have still been called 86-DOS and not MS-DOS. I know that I have
an MS-DOS version 1.25 which was supplied as the "crossover" to SCP
customers to transition them to being "Microsoft" customers.

Digital Research had CP/M-86 out at approximately the same time if not
earlier (my recollection is that CP/M-86 was available in 1980 or,
absolutely definitely by 1981). However, DR did not initially offer
CP/M-86 preconfigured for the IBM-PC, in order to not be competing with
IBM. But when IBM refused to price CP/M-86 and PC-DOS the same, that
eventually forced DR to release a boxed retail CP/M-86 preconfigured for
the IBM-PC at a reasonable price (I don't recall the exact price, but it
was something like $40; I still have a couple of those here).

I was there also. And probably closer to the situation and the
principals then you were.


BillW50 wrote:
> In news:qnkf45hr4j89u2i0gbjln7b333creeccv2@4ax.com,
> AJL typed on :
>> "BillW50" <BillW50@aol.kom> wrote:
>>
>>> I don't believe there was a MS-DOS v1.0 ever.
>> http://www.nukesoft.co.uk/msdos/dosversions.shtml
>>
>> http://www.linfo.org/ms-dos.html
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS#...ote-paterson-1
>
> First of all, show me a picture of MS-DOS v1.0. They called QDOS as
> MS-DOS 1.0, but I never seen any MS-DOS v1.0 copies ever and I don't
> know what good they were for anyway if they did exists. As they were
> only good on the original IBM-PC anyway and they already had PC-DOS
> anyway.
>
> I and others wanted Gary Kildall to get off his butt to write CPM-86 for
> the Intel 8086 chipset. Gary didn't care and luckily Tim Patterson did
> so instead. Gary didn't care until the PC had taken off and then Gary
> cared. Then he finally wrote CPM-86 and sold it for over 200 bucks a
> piece. Almost nobody bought it of course since PC-DOS was far cheaper
> and easier to use. Later CPM-86 became DR-DOS.
>
> And I don't recall any versions of MS-DOS at least commercially before
> Compaq created the first IBM clone. And that didn't happen until DOS v2
> something from what I recall. Also I don't know if I would trust those
> links. As some of them are wrong. I know, since I was there.
>