Re: @heyrick - Sounds like a bored dev is trying to make a name for himself
> rewrote almost all of it so that it would pass IBM acceptance standards.
Actually IBM did some of the rewrites when Gary Kildall showed IBM that PC-DOS 1.0 could display a DRI copyright.
> but there wasn't anything wrong with what they did then.
Granted it was SCP that took CP/M 1.3 and 'decompiled' it to build QDOS. SCP needed an operating system to develop their 8086 based Zebra systems, the 8085 ones used CP/M and CP/M-86 was running late. 'Decompilers' were available which produced an annotated assembler listing* for a variety of commercial programs including CP/M BDOS (the annotations were hand written and attached to the assembler created from a genuine copy of the binary code). Intel had a converter that changed 8085 ASM into 8086 ASM. Compile this up and it was a "Quick and Dirty OS (QDOS)".
The original QDOS used CP/M file system so that an 8085 Zebra could be used to build a system disk then swap the CPU board (S100 based) to the 8086 and reboot.
So, was MS wrong to use a pirated system ? Both SCP and MS were full DRI OEMs and had everything that DRI provided to OEMs (MS for the Z80 softcard) so they should have known.
* The CP/M BDOS had actually been written in PL/M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
