Tim Paterson

Given the context and your reference to Quake, I assume by "the older days" you mean the 90s, PCs and early Windows? If you weren't previously aware of "The Old New Thing" blog, Raymond Chen has been sharing stories about Windows 95 development for decades at this point. So many in fact, he published a book under the same name (the book is essentially a best-of collection from the blog in paper form). The os2museum[1] blog is also a gold mine. Tim Paterson at one point tried to start blogging, sharing a few anecdotes about the early days of DOS[2] Speaking of books, you might enjoy "Showstopper!" about the development of NT, even tough it is a bit shallow on the technical side. For the technical aspects, you might want to get it together with "Inside Windows NT" (first edition) by Helen Custer. You might also enjoy: "Another Boring Topic" [3] YouTube channel, covering (among other things) early Windows development in excruciating detail and "Old Computers Sucked" [4], actually trying to run the software on era appropriate hardware. "Cathode Ray Dude" is all over the place but often also covers hardware and software of roughly that era[5]. A sibling comment already mentioned JWZs blog, if you have fond memories about Netscape, you might enjoy "Project Code Rush" [6]. Btw. Netscape Navigator 3.0 has just turned 30. [1] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/ [2] https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/@AnotherBoringTopic/videos [4]…

Paterson claims CP/M-86 wasn't released yet in http://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/2007/09/design-of-dos.html?m=1: > We knew Digital Research was working on a 16-bit OS, CP/M-86. At one point we were expecting it to be available at the end of 1979. Had it made its debut at any time before DOS was working, the DOS project would have been dropped. SCP wanted to be a hardware company, not a software company.

I thought this was interesting: "Intel documented how the original software developer could mechanically translate an 8-bit program into a 16-bit program. Only the developer of the program with possession of the source code could make this translation. I designed DOS so the translated program would work the same as it had with CP/M – translation compatibility. The key to making this work was implementing the CP/M API." https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-dos-rip-off-of-cpm.html

This has never been a serious question. People have looked at DOS for years and never found any stolen CP/M code. Tim Paterson has written about how DOS was designed here: https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/2007/09/design-of-dos.html https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-dos-rip-off-of-cpm.html. His employer was selling an 8086 computer but had no operating system for it, so he proposed making QDOS, a placeholder operating system that they could sell until CP/M-86 was available. He made QDOS compatible with the publicly documented CP/M API, but did not look at how the API was implemented. This made it possible for software companies to easily make QDOS ports of their existing CP/M software by automatically translating the source code from 8080 assembly to 8086 assembly. Paterson himself took advantage of this. The 8086 assembler and source code translator were originally CP/M programs written in 8080 assembly, then he translated them to 8086 in order to make QDOS self-hosting. It's somewhat ironic that Kildall was angry about DOS copying the CP/M API because Digital Research went on to release DR-DOS, an 8086 operating system that was API compatible with MS-DOS.