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wpollock • last Saturday at 1:53 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

It wasn't a "base to start with". MS Dos was QDOS. I was a summer intern in the early 1980s with IBM in Kingston, NY, and had access to the source. Gates didn't even bother to remove the SCP copyright notice from the comments, nor the references to QDOS. Too bad "sed" and "awk" weren't available for search and replace back then.

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canucker2016 • last Saturday at 3:45 AM

Much of the remaining QDOS/PCDOS work was probably adapting to the IBM BIOS.

from Tim Paterson's website, https://web.archive.org/web/20190722012644/http://www.paters...

  ...In May, he went to Microsoft to work full-time on the PC-DOS version of 86-DOS.

  "The first day on the job I walk through the door and 'Hey! It's IBM,' " says Paterson, grinning impishly. "I worked at Microsoft a neat eleven months. In May, June, and July I worked on things I hadn't quite finished, refining PC-DOS."

  International Business Machinations.

  This was the beginning of an eleven-month hurricane. Almost daily, Paterson shipped stuff to Boca Raton for IBM's approval, and IBM would instantly return comments, modifications, and more problems.

  "They were real thorough. I would send them a disk the same day via Delta Dash. IBM would be on the phone to me as soon as the disk arrived." Paterson pauses and winds up. He's remembering one request that clashed violently with his view of the project.

  "IBM wanted CP/M prompts. It made me throw up." But when IBM asks, you comply if you're a lowly programmer, and that is what Paterson did.

  He finished PC-DOS in July, one month before the pc was officially announced to the world. By this time, 86-DOS had become MS-DOS.