• datendefekt@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    One Friday afternoon, Gary called the engineering staff together and announced that he would give them all a raise over the weekend. On Monday, when they returned to work, contractors began raising the building to make room in the basement for a new Digital Equipment Corporation VAX 11/750 computer system. After several weeks, supported by heavy wooden beams and house jacks, the engineers’ desks were five feet higher.

    I’d have loved to work for him!

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Gary Kildall was so depressed he committed suicide, because Bill Gates (Microsoft) stole his OS and used it and his mothers position in IBM to undercut him, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

    PS:
    I can write that Bill Gates and Microsoft stole it without fear of repercussions from either, because that’s already been decided in a court of law decades ago.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Gary Kildall’s lawyer later stated Gary Kildall lacked the tenacity Bill Gates had, because he didn’t sue based on same lawyers legal advice, that software probably wasn’t legally protected by copyright.

        If you don’t know, QDOS was copied from CP/M, and Microsoft bought QDOS and relabeled it MS-DOS, and sold it to IBM as PC-DOS. Main difference being that Microsoft removed the few safety features that were present in CP/M, causing decades of nightmares with bad security and viruses.

        • scorpious@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          But the suicide part … that confirmed as well?

          Honestly don’t know, just surprised to read that.

  • MakePorkGreatAgain@lemmy.basedcount.com
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    2 months ago

    was cp/m really that good? never used it and all of the media I’ve seen of it looks like just another variant of dos. i grew up using dos, and I use the shell for a lot of stuff at work all the time these days, but i think most people prefer to interact via a gui

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Because DOS is a stolen illegal copy of CP/M, but with a few features removed. And yes CP/M was way better, and had for instance multitasking way before MS-DOS. And it had filesystem safety, the lack of which caused decades of security nightmares on PC.

    • hperrin@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I think you mean DOS looks like a variant of CP/M, because DOS started as a clone of CP/M.