Re: [TCLUG:17392] [OT] Some computing history?

[Luke Francl <fran0382@tc.umn.edu>]

On Mon, 8 May 2000, Philip C Mendelsohn wrote:

> They ended up looking for someone who could supply a CP/M knockoff (which
> was already fairly UNIX influenced) and ended up talking to Microsoft, who
> bought out another CP/M (I forget which) and cobbled it together and you
> know the rest.

Sadly, I can't remember much more of this story (I used to be big into PC
history), but I do remember the name of the OS that Microsoft bought,
which became DOS. It was called "QDOS" which stood for "Quick and Dirty
Operating System". Microsoft bought it from another Seattle software
company (the name of which escapes me) for $50,000. Obviously, they didn't
tell this company what the had planned for it! QDOS became DOS 1.0, with
minimal changes.

A good source for interesting stories like this is the book "PC Roadkill"
by some guy whose name I forget. It's strongly biased to the PC/Mac world,
but it does have a little on Unix. It even has a mention of Linux as a
"shareware operating system", circa 1996. Anyway, my copy's at home in, so
I can't quote from it or anything, but it was a pretty interesting book.

Luke