Did Bill Gates Steal the Heart of DOS?

Years later, DRI was selling its own version of DOS (DR-DOS) which was widely considered technically superior to MS-DOS or PC-DOS (e.g. At one point it supported preemptive multitasking and could also run Windows 3.x iirc.)

The real "theft" was that when the original developer of QDOS went bankrupt, its mos valuable asset was its DOS license. But when it tried to sell it Microsoft sued and forced the owner to sell the license to Microsoft for a very low figure. Meanwhile, DR-DOS was killed using a combination of deliberate incompatibilities and eventually Windows 95.

I never used DR-DOS, but I remember greatly preferring PC-DOS to MS-DOS because the default text editor was so much nicer.

The fact the article makes zero mention of DR-DOS is a bit puzzling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS

But history does have its ability to make things unclear over time so can see why people argue about 2000 year old books, let alone software in our own lifetimes.

Only thing I feel sad about is that OS/2 was not open sourced 10 years ago.

Still in another 10 years or so people will be writting stories about how Linux was a rip of from Minix and other historical things without any hope of changing the past.

RIP Gary Kildall.

EDIT: keep forgetting HN comments aren't Markdown.

My guess: “Comerr” was a routine that handles either communication errors or command errors

When this guy encounters "foo" and "bar" his head will explode.

I expect better from IEEE, this is not even at the level of TechCrunch!